As the world stands on the precipice of a new industrial age, most people remain unaware that its foundations are not abstract technologies, but materials extracted from the earth itself. Critical minerals, defined in policy circles as non-fuel minerals that are strategically essential yet whose supply chains are highly volatile, sit at the centre of this global shift.
Unlike oil, which is produced in several regions across the globe, these minerals are often geographically concentrated, and there are no commercially viable alternatives for their use. This implies that by their very nature, critical minerals are highly vulnerable to geopolitical disruption and trade restrictions.
While most people remain unaware of their significance, critical minerals are powering daily digital life in semiconductors and communication devices, and driving the green transition with technologies such as electric vehicles and solar panels. They also underpin several defence industries, as they are used in the manufacturing of advanced electronics, stealth aircraft and precision-guided munitions.
Given that Africa holds approximately 30% of the world’s critical minerals but captures a fraction of the downstream benefits, it’s unsurprising that South Africa sought to address this imbalance under its 2025 G20 presidency. South Africa opted to frame critical minerals as the backbone of a greener, fairer global economy, promising “local beneficiation at source” and resilient supply chains that catalyse broad-based development rather than raw material exports.
Under the theme “Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability”, South Africa sought to integrate critical minerals into a sustainable industrial policy, advocating for reducing the “African risk premium” that has prevented African companies from constructing refineries that the G20 encourages.
While South Africa’s approach has broken ground compared to previous G20 presidencies, it still bypasses a core constraint that will ultimately decide whether its ambitions succeed. The security governance of Africa’s extractive frontiers has long been a contested subject. Across Africa’s mineral belts, extraction is unfolding in what might more accurately be called security theatres than production zones.
In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, cobalt and coltan deposits are embedded in conflict systems that have persisted for the better part of 30 years. In northern Mozambique, gas, graphite, and rubies sit at the centre of an Islamist insurgency and a heavily militarised development model, and along the Sahelian gold corridors, jihadist organisations and criminal syndicates are generating significant revenues through taxation and smuggling.
In these contexts, insecurity is not an external risk that can be mitigated once beneficiation has been engineered. It is a constitutive feature of mineral governance, and if Africa is to move from rule-taker to rule-maker, its engagement with the G20 critical minerals agenda must start from this fact. This article argues for a security-first approach to critical mineral governance, using some of Africa’s most pronounced cases of critical mineral conflict to illustrate how beneficiation without security reform is likely to fail.
Today, the eastern DRC has become all but synonymous with seemingly intractable conflict. While failures of regional missions and deepening humanitarian crises dominate global headlines, a lesser-known fact is that the DRC supplies more than 70% of the world’s cobalt. The country holds roughly half of the world’s known reserves, alongside major deposits of coltan, tin, and tungsten. These minerals are used in batteries, electronics, and aerospace devices, with NATO listing cobalt and tungsten among 12 defence-critical raw materials for advanced military hardware.
Commercially, DRC’s cobalt sector is dominated by a small group of multinational mining firms and Chinese-backed refiners, according to the International Peace Information Service (IPIS). At the same time, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) remains a visible part of the regional landscape and a crucial source of livelihoods for many local communities. A mapping study of 829 ASM sites between 2021 and 2023 across eastern DRC found that a large share of these sites operated in the presence of state security forces or non-state armed actors who levied illegal taxes, protection fees, and road tolls, compounding the predatory practices that have long shaped mineral extraction in the DRC.
Attempts to address these practices and formalise the ASM sector have intensified in recent years, largely due to companies seeking to mitigate reputational damage for being associated with such landscapes. Yet, as the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) noted in a December 2025 report, detailed research on company-led formalisation schemes shows that cooperatives and controlled buying programmes often displace risk back onto miners due to unstable prices, exclusion from accredited sites, or continued exposure to hazardous conditions. Where police units, army factions, local militias, and customary authorities all compete to tax mining pits and transport routes, formalisation can add another layer to an already crowded protection market.
Meanwhile, the conflict itself has deepened. In response, the DRC government has extended bans on mineral trading from dozens of artisanal sites in Masisi and Kalehe, citing evidence that they are financing armed groups. The United States and its allies have followed suit and sanctioned armed actors and traders based in Rubaya and beyond for conflict-linked coltan and other minerals. While these measures are necessary, they do not replace the need to rebuild legitimate and accountable public authority mechanisms in mining territories.
Existing measures, such as those employed by the state and consumer countries, treat conflict minerals mainly as a problem of criminality and supply chain compliance, but do not fundamentally alter the hybrid security order in which these minerals are embedded. Global governance frameworks largely assume that if bad actors and tainted supply streams are targeted, the underlying system can be nudged toward normality. But eastern DRC has demonstrated the opposite: so long as the monopoly of violence is fragmented and key security actors are themselves rentseekers in the mineral economy, beneficiation plans and minerals-for-security agreements will plug into a war economy rather than displace it.
This pattern is not unique to the Great Lakes; it reappears further south along Mozambique’s gas and graphite frontier.
In Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, vast offshore gas discoveries and major ruby and graphite deposits transformed one of the country’s poorest regions into a global extractive frontier almost overnight. TotalEnergies’ $20 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) project is the largest single foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa, and, together with other mining projects, was intended to drive new growth in Mozambique.
Instead, Cabo Delgado has found itself in the grip of a deadly insurgency since 2017. After more than eight years of conflict, the insurgency has claimed the lives of more than 6,000 people and displaced over a million more, with up to 700,000 people remaining internally displaced, as noted in an Institute for Security Studies (ISS) report in October last year.
By 2021, attacks near Palma had forced TotalEnergies to declare force majeure and evacuate its staff, while several other mining projects had likewise experienced shutdowns due to security disruptions. Despite successive security operations and the deployment of Rwandan and SADC forces, several projects remain either on hold or experience periodic shutdowns due to renewed violence and political instability. As in the DRC, the global response has been overwhelmingly framed as a project-specific risk, with the focus on hardening measures around extractive sites and on negotiating foreign military and private security deployments. This has created an archipelago of fortified mining enclaves, surrounded by neglected rural areas.
From a global governance perspective, Cabo Delgado is often treated as an unfortunate deviation from otherwise bankable gas and mineral investments. For G20 actors, the solution tends to lie in better risk-sharing instruments, yet this technocratic framing ignores a core political reality. In Mozambique, as in many other African countries, the same security apparatuses tasked with protecting extractive investments have historically been unaccountable to local populations and occasionally been implicated in widespread rights abuses themselves. Across the Sahel, gold corridors illustrate the regional and cross-border implications of such patterns even more starkly.
While cobalt and gas dominate debates on the energy transition, gold has quietly financed some of Africa’s deadliest conflicts. Over the past 15 years, a gold rush has swept across the Sahel, especially Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, driven by new discoveries and a sustained rise in international gold prices. Artisanal and small-scale mining now accounts for roughly half of the region’s gold production, with much of it taking place outside of formal channels.
In this environment, armed groups and criminal networks have entrenched themselves as key regulators of the region’s gold economy. Jihadist organisations aligned with alQaeda and the Islamic State levy taxes on mining sites, extort transporters, and control smuggling routes towards coastal states and onward trading hubs, particularly Dubai. For communities caught between predatory security forces, bandits, and extremists, participation in informal gold economies is often a survival strategy as much as an income source.
International responses frequently treat these dynamics as problems of illicit financial flows and terrorism financing, which can be addressed through tighter border controls and anti-money laundering measures. However, while these initiatives are necessary, they overlook the underlying governance deficit due to the state’s limited presence in mining areas, the weakness or capture of regulatory institutions, and growing reliance on military regimes that themselves seek to centralise control over mining rents. Thus, proposals to expand refineries or develop gold-backed financial instruments in Sahelian states, including in broader continental debates over mineral-backed currencies, risk entrenching elites and armed brokers who already profit from today’s disorder.
This then begs the question of what it means to design critical mineral beneficiation strategies that account for Africa’s security governance realities. A useful starting point is to treat mining regions as priority theatres for governance reform, not merely as enclaves for industrial policy. This aligns with several existing frameworks, such as the African Green Minerals Strategy and repeated civil society calls for “people first” mining agendas. For the G20, this would require bundling its support for smelters, refineries, and battery plants with commitments to strengthen institutions around extractive corridors.
The AU’s permanent G20 membership and South Africa’s 2025 presidency offer a platform to promote corridor-based security architectures, such as the contested DRC-Rwanda-Uganda axis, the Mozambique-Tanzania coast, and the Sahel-to-Gulf gold routes. Such compacts can combine joint intelligence and policing and harmonise customs regimes through regional bodies rather than ad hoc bilateral deals. The G20 is uniquely placed to back these initiatives through financing and technical support, and can condition its derisking instruments and infrastructure investments on progress in cooperation rather than on narrow project-level guarantees.
Downstream companies and G20 states have historically focused on traceability and due diligence mechanisms to regulate labour and environmental standards. These efforts should now be extended to interrogate the security orders underpinning mineral supply. Procurement standards could require evidence that revenues support transparent public budgets, that security forces around mines are subject to civilian oversight, and that grievance mechanisms genuinely constrain abuses.
Metrics such as the share of ASM production entering formal channels, or trends in violent incidents in mining zones, should count as indicators of success alongside export volumes and value addition. A recent policy brief under South Africa’s G20 presidency calls for a global mining standard, traceability mechanisms, and a just transition fund for mining communities. These proposals could be strengthened by explicitly tying financial support and market access to reforms in security governance instead of only to technical upgrades in processing capacity.
Against a backdrop of increasingly fractured geopolitics, including the US–China rivalry over rare earths and a broader global scramble for secure supplies of critical minerals, these resources are being cast as Africa’s ticket into strategic value chains. They are also, more fundamentally, a test of whether the continent can renegotiate the security architectures that have long transformed resource wealth into conflict and exclusion. If G20-backed beneficiation strategies fail to confront the reality of extractive zones as security theatres, they will likely reproduce familiar patterns: enclave projects surrounded by insecurity, sanctions that displace rather than dismantle war economies, and narratives that blame “African instability” when investments grind to a halt due to security threats.
By reframing beneficiation as a security governance project, African governments can push the G20 toward a more honest compact, one that recognises that the real bottleneck in critical mineral supply chains is not only geology or capital but the fractured political orders in which mines operate. For South Africa’s G20 presidency, success will not be measured merely by the number of processing plants announced, but by whether the architectures of security around Africa’s mineral frontiers begin to shift.
Erika van der Merwe
Erika is a research intern with the Peace and Security Programme at Good Governance Africa. She is pursuing a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Cape Town, where she specialises in security studies. Her academic interests include counterinsurgency, military science, and African peace and security. Erika has contributed to the Yale Review of International Studies and has experience in intelligence writing in a consulting capacity. She has also held several executive student leadership positions at the university, where she focused on youth development and private sector engagement.
