Peripheries on the Rise: Eco-Imperialism in the Race for Technology Resourcing

For decades, the technology industry enjoyed relatively easy access to essential natural resources—minerals, water, and energy—needed for electronic devices and data processing. However, increased US-China tensions, trade tariffs, resource nationalism, and ecological damage are making it harder to secure these resources. The rising demands of new developments, such as critical minerals for electric vehicles (EVs) and energy for Artificial Intelligence (AI), are adding to the challenge. Against this backdrop, this article argues that an ongoing race to secure technology resourcing is giving rise to a wave of ‘technological peripheralisation’, namely mounting pressures on areas in both the Global South and North to become mere providers of natural resources for technological development. In the current conjuncture, technological peripheralisation often leads to ‘eco-imperialism’, which outsources ecological damage and undermines local ways of relating to nature in the name of ‘transition’ technologies. Local forms of resistance, however, are opposing top-down pressures to keep these areas from becoming peripheries. We illustrate these points with case studies on lithium extraction in the Lickan Antay Indigenous territory in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and in Cáceres, in the so-called ‘emptied’ Spain. While empirically focusing on lithium, our analysis illustrates how broader shifts in technology resourcing are intensifying planetary asymmetries in a way that goes beyond historical distinctions between Global South and Global North.