Blog post archive

Friday, 17 Jan 2025
Greenland Is Not for Sale

President Donald Trump has provoked strong reactions with his proposition to buy Greenland, not the least because the right to self-determination is a fundamental principle in international law, allowing peoples to freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development. Home Rule Greenland has a long ...

Wednesday, 27 Sep 2023
Norway, a New Mining Nation?

The energy transition and ‘green’ technologies spark enormous demands for minerals. Norway set out to become a supplier of raw materials which, in the current geopolitical tensions, are much needed not only by the country itself but also the European Union. In late June 2023, the Norwegian government’s Ministry of ...

Wednesday, 1 Mar 2023
Renewable Energy, Renewable Conflicts? How a Lithium Rush in Zimbabwe Is Raising Tensions

In October 2022, lithium prices reached an all-time high. Lithium is an essential component for electric vehicle batteries, and with the current high ambitions in electrification of transport, demand for the mineral has been rapidly increasing, hitting a record price of $74,475 per tonne in October 2022. In Zimbabwe, where ...

Thursday, 19 Jan 2023
Land and Mining in the Green Energy Transition

Global mining uses more than 57.000 km2 of land. This area is likely to expand in the coming years due to a rising mineral demand for low-carbon technologies. The more strategic minerals become, the more critical the land becomes below which they are found. This poses a number of challenges. ...

Monday, 5 Sep 2022
Norway and the Geopolitics of Battery Minerals

Batteries are as essential to the “green” energy transition as wind parks, solar power, and electric cars. These green energy technologies all require vast amounts of minerals. Norway has the potential to be an important new supplier of batteries, but it has been surprisingly silent on the issue – until ...

Sunday, 13 Feb 2022
Good Reads: Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics & Political Economy

Green Curses project member Stacy VanDeveer has written a book review of three new, exciting books in the fields of comparative environmental politics and comparative political economy. The three books bring together the study of energy, the environment, and political economy, looking at energy transitions in middle-income countries, firms’ cross-border ...

Friday, 26 Nov 2021
Good Reads: Resource Sovereignty

Green Curses research project member Dr. John Andrew McNeish, Professor at the Faculty of Landscape and Society at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, has just published two books on contestations over natural resources. The first book, a monograph authored by McNeish and entitled Sovereign Forces: Everyday Challenges to Environmental ...

Monday, 22 Nov 2021
Climate Resilience and Conflict: Multi-stakeholder Partnerships As A Way Forward?

As world leaders convened in Glasgow for the 26th annual Conference of Parties (COP 26) in hopes of accelerating action on the Paris Agreement and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the correlation between climate change and conflict is receiving more attention. In recent years, there has been ...

Tuesday, 9 Nov 2021
Niger’s Kandadji Dam Project: Conflict Concerns

The Kandadji Dam project in Niger is projected to  displace about 38,000 people living near the Niger River due to the ongoing activities. The economic development goals of the project are to address food, water and energy insecurities in the region. The  initiative is part of the larger Niger River Basin ...

Wednesday, 30 Jun 2021
Cultural Heritage and Renewable Energy: How Bujagali Hydro-Electricity Generation Project sparked a latent conflict

The Bujagali hydropower dam, on the Bujagali Falls, is located on the Victoria Nile on Dumbbell Island, in Jinja. It is an important hydropower project in Uganda, and was initially approved in 1994 as the lowest cost option to increase power production in the country with a total cost of ...

Thursday, 20 May 2021
Mind the Gap: Policy, Righting wrongs and circumventing oil curses in Uganda’s Albertine region

Uganda has signed a pipeline deal with Tanzania and Total to transport crude oil from Uganda’s Albertine region to Tanzania’s Tanga port for refining, but the secrecy that surrounds this $3.5 billion project attracts questions around its viable benefit to the citizenry. For Uganda, this oil presents huge opportunities and ...

Friday, 7 May 2021
Improving Resource Governance and Building Sustainable Peace

In a recently published piece in World Development, Florian Krampe, Farah Hegazi and Stacy D VanDeveer explore the potentially dramatic benefits of improved environmental and resource governance for post-war peacebuilding. They outline three causal mechanisms – or pathways – for environmental peacebuilding: (a) the contact hypothesis, (b) diffusion of transnational ...

Tuesday, 4 May 2021
Green Energy Development and Transition: Have we seen this film before?

“I have seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending”. Surely these words have nothing to do with government commitments to the adoption of bright green technologies and the sustainable development goals made in the run up to COP 26. Surely green energy development is all new and ...

Tuesday, 13 Apr 2021
Green Spaces for “Green” Energy: What Are the Implications of Damming Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda?

Like many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Uganda finds itself with a steadily growing population and emerging economy. Simultaneously, the government struggles to provide basic services to its growing population, while preserving its natural resources. Encapsulated within this struggle is an ongoing debate between conservationists and the Ugandan government over the ...

Tuesday, 13 Apr 2021
Cobalt and the Congo: A Sustainable Green Energy Transition Cannot Be Built on Human Exploitation

General Motors, one of the United State’s most important automakers, announced in January 2021 that it would phase out petroleum-powered cars and trucks and sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035. Although one of the auto industry’s most ambitious moves, electric vehicles (EVs) cannot be produced or driven without cobalt, we ...

Tuesday, 26 Jan 2021
Green & Sustainable Mining: Green-Washing in the Extractive Industries?

What is behind the recent push for mining companies to go green and improve the sustainability of their operations? Since around 2017, several policy reports and a growing number of news articles have highlighted how mining companies are increasingly trying to ensure that their operations are more environmentally sustainable and ...

Wednesday, 20 Jan 2021
Good Reads: Rare Earths and Conflict across Scale

Rare earths metals made a lot of news over the last decade, after most of us spent years forgetting what we once learned their names on the periodic table. Rare earths consist of 17 different metals, from scandium (element 21) down to lutetium (element 71). They are important to a ...

Tuesday, 12 Jan 2021
Lithium in Zimbabwe: A future boom of doom?

Electric vehicles (EV) sales are on the rise. One of key ingredients for EV batteries is lithium, which is not that easily replaced as a key element in batteries. Thus, the demand in the lightweight mineral will continue to grow – the investment bank UBS estimates it demand will grow ...

Thursday, 17 Dec 2020
Clean Cobalt? A new initiative for a key mineral in electric vehicles

In September of this year, Tesla joined the Fair Cobalt Alliance (FCA), a new fair trade initiative launched by the Impact Facility earlier this year. The initiative aims to develop a supply of fairly sourced cobalt by improving practices and behaviors at cobalt mining sites. Specific goals of the FCA ...

Wednesday, 16 Dec 2020
A Dam Dispute

This hydropower project could trigger regional conflict in Africa. Conflict related to renewable energy received considerable international attention in 2020 with the launch of the Grand Ethiopia Renaissance Dam (GERD). Ethiopia began constructing what is now Africa’s largest dam back in 2011 in order to increase its low levels of ...

Wednesday, 16 Dec 2020
Welcome to the Green Curses Blog Series!

Welcome to the new Green Curses project blog series “Energy Transitions and Conflict”! We write about research, news, policy interventions, events, and other items of interest that pertain to the social, political, and economic dynamics underlying the often contentious implementation of renewable energy projects. We focus especially on the potential ...