Inside Chile’s Foreign Ministry: An Ethnography of a Small, Mineral-Rich State in Clean Energy Supply Chains

A growing literature analyses how the clean energy transition alters the geoeconomic landscape as states scramble to access critical minerals. Scholars have examined the passive role that small, mineral-rich states play as strategic battlegrounds of external powers vying for control over clean energy supply chains. Due to its relative political stability, large resource endowments, and low extraction costs, Latin America has received increased attention by academics and policymakers as the commodity superpower of the 21st century. Yet most research has disregarded the geoeconomic perspectives on the energy transition of small, mineral-rich Latin American states themselves. Bringing these perspectives into view matters. It demonstrates how states reformulate their foreign and industrial policies amid the Trump administration’s securitisation of critical minerals and China’s global dominance in mineral processing. It also helps us understand how relatively marginal actors in international politics position themselves in asymmetric relationships with hegemonic powers and leverage their resource endowments to act purposefully upon them. To make sense of these dynamics, this paper presents an ethnographic study of Chile’s Foreign Ministry. As the world’s largest producer of copper and second-largest producer of lithium, Chile is at the forefront of rapid geoeconomic transformations along critical mineral supply chains. Through participant observation, interviews and document analysis, my research examines how senior policymakers redefine Chile’s role in international relations based on its central position in the energy transition. I then trace how this role perception shapes Chile’s resource diplomacy towards China, the United States, the European Union, and emerging alliances like the Minerals Security Partnership and the BRICS+6—the principal actors in the global competition over Chilean minerals. My period of analysis starts in 2014, when Chile assumed strategic relevance in the global energy transition, and ends in 2026 with the completion of my fieldwork in the Foreign Ministry. As the first institutional ethnography of the Chilean state and critical mineral governance, the paper contributes to scholarship in political economy, international relations, and development studies. Methodologically, I introduce an ethnographic lens to centre the beliefs and everyday practices of policymakers in our understanding of the geoeconomics of clean energy supply chains. Theoretically, the study engages with constructivist foreign policy analysis and practice theories of diplomacy to explore how small states pursue strategic balancing and hedging as they become the focal point of resource competition. My work also uses the case of Chile to elicit new insights into the roles of domestic policy networks, business associations, and the politics-bureaucracy nexus in economic statecraft. Empirically, the paper raises new questions about how mineral-rich states in Latin America and beyond navigate the geopolitical risks and uncertainties posed by great power rivalry in the clean energy transition.