Sandra McKay (PhD Candidate) has published an article "Critical minerals or criminal miners? The (in)formalization of artisanal and small-scale copper mining in Peru," in The Extractive Industries and Society.
Using Peru as a case study, Sandra argues that "the temporary yet unending informalization policies of ASM [artisanal and small-scale mining] constitute an institutionalized frontier moment, whereby informal miners are positioned in a limbo between criticality and criminality: their products enter the global supply chain as 'legal-enough' critical minerals, but the miners remai