Articles & essays
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What Kind of Governance Does a Mining Company Need?
Mining governance is entering a more demanding cycle. As minerals become strategic to energy, defence, infrastructure and industrial policy, boards must move beyond formal structures and understand the mine itself: the technical, territorial and material system that turns resources into reliable supply.
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Mining Viability
Technical and economic feasibility can justify a mining project, but it does not guarantee production. Mining viability asks whether that project can become sustained supply inside a real system of law, territory, capital, legitimacy and institutional trust.
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The Mining Paradox: The Legitimacy Gap Behind Modern Life
Modern life depends on formal mining, from health care, food systems and infrastructure to energy, defense and artificial intelligence. The Mining Paradox examines why legitimacy is now strategic infrastructure in the era of Geopolitical Mining.
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What Makes a Mining Project Financeable?
Critical minerals demand has changed the mining conversation, but every project still has to prove that it can become a financeable business. This article examines the questions capital should ask before committing to a mining asset, across geology, permitting, infrastructure, revenue visibility, funding strategy and execution.
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Anomic Mining: Why Illegal Mining Is Not Always the Full Diagnosis
Anomic Mining describes the moment when illegal mining stops being only an activity outside the law and begins to reveal a deeper institutional condition, a territory where legality remains formally present, but no longer organises extraction, protects formal actors, sustains traceability, or governs mineral flows with credibility.
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The Return of the Material Economy
The World Bank’s new industrial policy report signals more than a technical adjustment in development thinking. It reflects a broader return of production, strategic sectors, and state capacity to the center of the debate. Read through a Geopolitical Mining lens, that shift carries a deeper implication: industrialization in the twenty first century rests on a…
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Beyond ESG: Rethinking Sustainability in Mining
As the material economy returns, mining is forcing a more serious question: not whether sustainability matters, but whether the dominant sustainability frameworks are still fit for sectors shaped by time, permitting, legitimacy, and execution. This article revisits ESG, maps the main conceptual alternatives now emerging, and argues that mining may require a more systemic form…
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What Mining Operations Must Prove After Ramp-Up
Ramp-up is often treated as a visible milestone in mining. But the more revealing phase comes later, when an operation must prove that throughput, recoveries, mine sequence, continuity and cost discipline can hold together under real operating pressure. Using Mantoverde and Caserones as contrasting cases, this article explores why visible progress and operating maturity are…
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Minerals Turn Strategic. Exploration Capital Stays Tactical.
Mining has entered a more strategic era, but exploration capital still flows mainly toward lower. risk, shorter horizon opportunities. That tension is now visible in the latest exploration, financing, and policy data.
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When Mining Becomes Geopolitical, the State and Diplomacy Must Change
Mining is no longer operating only as an extractive sector. As critical minerals become part of industrial resilience, economic security and alliance architecture, both the State and diplomacy must adapt to a new geopolitical role for mining.