Militarisation is Extraction: From Mines to Missiles
AidWatch is proud to have contributed to Militarisation is Extraction: From Mines to Missiles, a landmark 2025 position paper by the Yes to Life No to Mining (YLNM) global solidarity network. The paper does what so much mainstream development discourse refuses to: it names the system, traces its logic, and centres the communities paying the price.
The paper’s central argument is as stark as it is urgent. Militarisation and extractivism are not parallel crises, they are the same crisis. From cobalt fields in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to silver deposits on Xinka territory in Guatemala, to gold in the Sperrin Mountains of Northern Ireland, the minerals powering modern weapons systems are being ripped from lands whose communities never consented and whose resistance is being met with armed force, surveillance, criminalisation, and murder.
As the paper puts it with brutal clarity:
“From the mines that feed militaries, to the militaries that guard the mines.”
This is not abstract geopolitics. It is the lived reality of Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities across the Global South, and it is a reality in which Australia and Australian corporations are deeply implicated.
The paper is unflinching about the role of Australia and Canada as states that launder militarised extractivism through narratives of energy transition, national security, and strategic resilience. Australian exports of F-35 fighter jet components, including parts for which Australia is the only global manufacturer, have fed Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Australian rare earths feed the same supply chains. This is not a coincidence of geography, it is a policy choice, and it demands accountability.
What gives the paper its power is that it does not stop at diagnosis. It centres resistance: the Xinka community’s formal No to the Escobal mine after seven years of consultation, the decades-long West Papuan liberation struggle, Ecuador’s Indigenous-led uprising that voted down proposals to gut constitutional Rights of Nature. These are not footnotes, they are the point.
AidWatch shares YLNM’s conviction that genuine solidarity means more than awareness-raising. It means demanding that Australian corporations and the Australian government be held accountable for the harms their extractive industries inflict on communities worldwide, and standing with those communities in their right to say no.