The so-called green transition in response to the climate crisis provides the backdrop for this discussion on legal regimes of extraction. The minerals required for green transitioning, including in particular for electric vehicles, are known as transition minerals. The extraction of transition minerals is marked by colonial frontier thinking that is supported and legitimised by international legal norms and institutions. This is exemplified through legal regimes that enable mineral extraction in the DRC – an ‘old’ frontier – and Greenland – a ‘new’ frontier. These legal regimes regulate access to scarce resources, land and its minerals, and support the concentration of wealth. Access to land and minerals of states like the DRC and Greenland are at the heart of a political-economic inter-national and inter-imperial rivalry. Placing Rosa Luxemburg on imperialism in conversation with Brett Christophers on rentier capitalism, I describe these processes as imperial rentier capitalism.

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Dr. Christine Schwöbel-Patel is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow based at the Humboldt University Berlin. She is Reader at Warwick Law School and co-Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies. She is the author of Marketing Global Justice (CUP 2021) and Global Constitutionalism in International Legal Perspective (Brill 2011).