Papers

• The Political Economy of Racialization inside the Nickel Industrial Park in Morowali Putu Agung Nara Indra Prima Satya University of Amsterdam

  The development of the nickel industrial park in Morowali, Indonesia, promised job opportunities and improved welfare for Indonesian workers. Nevertheless, Chinese investments in the industrial park also attract an influx of Chinese workers, first as white-collar technical experts, then as blue-collar manual workers. In addition, the Chinese companies put both workers inside the workplace in exploitative working conditions, such as long working hours, low safety standards, a lack of proper equipment, high production targets, and so forth. Inside these backgrounds, the racial tensions emerge between the Chinese and Indonesian workers, as both are looking to survive in a competitive daily relationship inside the workplace. The situation leads to the central question of this research: “How do the exploitative working conditions of the nickel industrial parks trigger the racial tensions between the Chinese and Indonesian workers? What are the other main underlying factors that constitute these tensions besides the exploitative working conditions?’’ By combining the concepts of racialization and structural violence, this research highlights the interchange between the exploitation and discrimination of the workers from the companies’ rules, popular prejudices against Chinese in Indonesian society, and daily experiences of the workers inside the industrial park. For the methodology of this research, I employed ethnography by combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and media analysis. I completed the fieldwork and data collection for this research from March 2025 to August 2025 among the Indonesian manual workers. My preliminary findings highlight that the relationship between the Chinese and Indonesian workers is best portrayed as a spectrum between tension and cooperation, which is triggered by the amassing of discrimination in salaries/benefits, promotion opportunities, and the solidarity formed through small acts of solidarity, such as sharing food/snacks, small talks, and jokes via translation machines, or other friendly interactions inside the workplace.

• Nickel, Oligarchy, and the Reproduction of Unequal Exchange in the Energy Sector in Indonesia Aniello Iannone Universitas Diponegoro

  The global clean energy transition has turned nickel into one of the most strategically contested minerals of the twenty-first century. Indonesia, as the world’s largest producer, sits at the centre of this transformation yet the question of who actually benefits remains far from settled. This paper starts from a straightforward observation: despite ambitious downstreaming policies and significant foreign investment, the political economy of nickel in Indonesia continues to exhibit the structural features of peripheral extraction. Drawing on world-systems theory and unequal ecological exchange, the paper traces how domestic oligarchic networks leverage state regulatory instruments export bans, downstreaming mandates, the national strategic project framework to consolidate control over resource rents, often at considerable social and environmental cost to extraction-site communities. The massive post-2020 influx of Chinese capital into nickel smelting, rather than dismantling older patterns of dependency, has reconfigured them: new actors, similar structures. Environmental and labour burdens remain localised, while surplus value flows outward along global value chains.The paper engages critically with the narrative of semi-peripheral industrial upgrading accompanying Indonesia’s beneficiation strategy, arguing that this rhetoric functions primarily as a legitimating discourse one that allows domestic elites and international partners to present extractive arrangements as developmental achievements while the architecture of unequal exchange remains intact. Ultimately, the analysis challenges the assumption that the energy transition, as currently governed, offers a genuine departure from the extractive logics that have historically shaped North-South resource relations.

• Nickel Mining and Oligarchy in National Strategic Projects: Analysis of the Political Economy of Law and Its Impact to Human Rights. Herlambang Wiratraman University of Gadjah Mada

  The global clean energy transition has turned nickel into one of the most strategically contested minerals of the twenty-first century. Indonesia, as the world’s largest producer, sits at the centre of this transformation yet the question of who actually benefits remains far from settled. This paper starts from a straightforward observation: despite ambitious downstreaming policies and significant foreign investment, the political economy of nickel in Indonesia continues to exhibit the structural features of peripheral extraction. Drawing on world-systems theory and unequal ecological exchange, the paper traces how domestic oligarchic networks leverage state regulatory instruments export bans, downstreaming mandates, the national strategic project framework to consolidate control over resource rents, often at considerable social and environmental cost to extraction-site communities. The massive post-2020 influx of Chinese capital into nickel smelting, rather than dismantling older patterns of dependency, has reconfigured them: new actors, similar structures. Environmental and labour burdens remain localised, while surplus value flows outward along global value chains.The paper engages critically with the narrative of semi-peripheral industrial upgrading accompanying Indonesia’s beneficiation strategy, arguing that this rhetoric functions primarily as a legitimating discourse one that allows domestic elites and international partners to present extractive arrangements as developmental achievements while the architecture of unequal exchange remains intact. Ultimately, the analysis challenges the assumption that the energy transition, as currently governed, offers a genuine departure from the extractive logics that have historically shaped North-South resource relations.

• Critical raw materials: imperialism and its discontents Riccardo Fornasari Paris Dauphine University Vincenzo Maccarrone Scuola Normale Superiore Florence

  Critical raw materials are mostly located in Global South countries, but a significant share is manufactured by Global North businesses. Therefore, contemporary imperialism, and the dynamics of unequal exchange that define it, shape patterns of extraction, accumulation, and appropriation. However, the neoliberal global order is unravelling and new contestations of the patterns of production and trade that it had established are ever more contested. Choosing as two case studies Indonesia’s governance of nickel and Chile’s governance of lithium, we assess their interactions with EU laws and their effects on workers’ rights and the environment. By doing so, this study casts light on the working of imperialism. It highlights the persistent neocolonial attitude of the EU and some spaces of resistance to it: these are highly dependent on the share of the minerals each Global South country commands and the networks of production, trade, and finance to which it participates.

Abstract

Keywords

• Chinese projects
• Chinese workers
• Indonesia
• National Strategic Projects
• energy transition
• human rights
• nickel
• nickel industry
• nickel mining
• oligarchy
• political economy of resources
• unequal exchange
• world-systems theory