Critical Minerals, Critical Risks: How Global Lithium Demand Reconfigures Security Dynamics in the Sahel

Contemporary debates on geoeconomics remain largely state-centric, assuming that governments exercise coherent control over resources, markets, and supply chains. This article challenges that assumption by examining how fragmented political economies can generate geoeconomic effects without consolidated authority or explicit geostrategic intent. Focusing on lithium extraction in the Sahel, it argues that where authority is dispersed across state institutions, armed non-state actors (NSAs), and informal economic networks, control over extraction and trade becomes structurally distributed. This fragmentation limits a state’s ability to translate resource endowments into strategic leverage, while simultaneously reducing its vulnerability to external coercive capture, producing a form of defensive insulation. Drawing on documentary analysis and a case study of northern Nigeria, the article shows how lithium extraction is becoming embedded within pre-existing conflict economies. While NSAs pursue local objectives, their activities shape supply conditions and market dynamics within globally significant resource systems. The article concludes that geoeconomic theory must move beyond state-centric assumptions to account for fragmentation, informality, and the distributed nature of agency in resource-rich but weakly governed environments.