This talk introduces vectoral geopolitics as a framework for rethinking extractive politics in the critical mineral era. Mr. Thomas Hale builds from vertical and volumetric geopolitics, which have shown how power operates through depth, territory, and the three-dimensional control of space, and argues that extraction must also be understood through direction, movement, tempo, and time. As materials move farther from their original sites of extraction through global supply chains, they do not lose their political significance. Instead, they transform economies, cultures, and political relationships across space and time, producing new forms of dependency, inequality, conflict, and geopolitical tensions.
Drawing on research in Greenland’s Gardar Igneous Province, Mr. Thomas Hale examines how subsurface geologies shape surface politics, while political choices, regulatory regimes, and development timelines determine which mineral futures become possible. By moving from volumes to vectors, the talk offers a four-dimensional approach to extractive geopolitics that better captures how critical mineral projects are imagined and whose clocks rule in decision making. Vectoral geopolitics helps scholars and policymakers, both in the field of social science and geoscience, see why the politics of the subsurface is always, at once, a politics of direction and time as much as it is of volume and verticality.
Speaker
Mr. Thomas Hale
Doctoral Student Fellow, Critical Minerals Supply Chains
