The architecture of opacity: Zimbabwe diamond industry’s lessons on critical mineral supply chains

As the world races to secure the critical minerals needed for a low-carbon future, a troubling pattern is emerging. The surging demand for resources such as lithium, cobalt and copper threatens to reproduce a system of exploitation and unaccountability that has long plagued resource-rich nations.

To understand the risks of this new era of “green extractivism”, we need look no further than the recent history of Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond fields.

The story of Marange is both a cautionary tale about weak institutions and corruption, and a stark illustration of how governments can deliberately engineer what we term an “architecture of opacity.”

We developed this term in a recently published paper to describe a coercive, militarised system designed to capture national wealth for elite enrichment while purposefully and systematically dismantling any possibility of transparency or accountability. How can supply chains be transparent when they are established with the explicit intent to obscure?

Manufacturing opacity

In 2008, Zimbabwe was in the grip of a severe economic and political crisis. The ruling Zanu-PF party, facing an unprecedented challenge to its power, seized upon the newly discovered Marange diamond fields as a political and financial lifeline. What followed was a masterclass in “securitisation”, the process of framing an issue as an existential national security threat to justify extraordinary, extra-legal measures.

The government violently expelled tens of thousands of artisanal miners from the fields in a brutal military operation. This was not about restoring order; it was about violently enclosing a national resource for elite enrichment.

The state transformed citizens seeking a livelihood into enemies of the state, justifying the creation of a militarised “Protected Area” sealed off from civilian administration and normal legal oversight.

This physical enclosure was the first pillar of the architecture of opacity. The second was the creation of a “military-commercial complex.” The state orchestrated secretive joint ventures between state-owned entities and obscure foreign companies.

Crucially, the boards of these companies were stacked with serving and retired senior military and intelligence officers. The security forces became direct commercial beneficiaries of the resources they were supposedly regulating.

The third pillar involved the creation of parallel financial structures. Because the security sector controlled the joint ventures, billions of dollars in diamond profits bypassed the national treasury entirely. Instead, they flowed into an off-budget slush fund used to finance patronage networks and political campaigns.

Finally, the state aggressively neutralised all forms of oversight. The Parliamentary Committee on Mines and Energy was repeatedly denied access to the fields on the grounds of “national security.” Journalists and civil society activists were harassed and arrested. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme was outmanoeuvred by a government that adeptly framed demands for accountability as neo-colonial interference.

The result was catastrophic: massive revenue loss, gross human rights abuses and the deep erosion of democratic institutions. Opacity in Marange was not a passive byproduct of weak governance; it was an actively produced, deliberate political strategy.

The critical minerals rush: Repeating the cycle?

The global transition to renewable energy is fundamentally mineral-intensive. This surge in mining is largely occurring in countries already grappling with political instability and fragile governance. Alarmingly, the competition for these critical minerals is increasingly being framed in the language of national security and geopolitical rivalry, the very conditions that allow the architecture of opacity to flourish.

The Marange blueprint in the critical minerals sector

1. The militarisation of territory: The contemporary rush for minerals is seeing the physical enclosure and militarisation of extractive zones. In Zimbabwe itself, state security forces have violently evicted artisanal lithium miners to facilitate operations for foreign mining companies. Globally, the use of private military companies to guard mineral sites is growing. By framing legitimate social and environmental disputes as threats to economic sovereignty, states are creating territories removed from public scrutiny.

2. The fusion of security and commerce: The military-commercial complex is re-emerging through a new wave of “minerals-for-security” agreements. These deals, often negotiated in secret by security and diplomatic agencies rather than publicly accountable ministries, trade security guarantees for access to resources. They create para-statal governance structures that operate outside democratic institutions, mirroring the opaque joint ventures of Marange.

3. Parallel financial structures: Parallel financial structures and their associated arrangements facilitate the diversion of resource revenues. The financial benefits of minerals-for-security deals often take the form of off-budget military support or undeclared payments, rather than taxable profits subject to parliamentary oversight. This weakens the coordination necessary for effective development and limits a country’s regulatory sovereignty.

4. The neutralisation of oversight: The framing of critical minerals as an urgent national security issue allows governments to justify extraordinary secrecy. It legitimises the fast-tracking of environmental assessments, the classification of mining contracts as state secrets, and the suppression of civil society. Internationally, geopolitical competition is silencing criticism, as governments may hesitate to sanction human rights abuses for fear of losing access to vital supply chains.

Moving beyond ‘transparency’

The lessons from Marange are urgent. The global rush for critical minerals threatens to replicate the devastating dynamics of the resource curse on an unprecedented scale. We argue that conventional transparency prescriptions – such as those advocated by global governance initiatives – are often insufficient. This is because opacity is actively and deliberately produced by powerful political and security structures; simply demanding financial disclosures and knowing the source of minerals is not enough. In fact, “transparency” without structural transformation can sometimes serve to obfuscate the very real social and environmental injustices at the heart of global mining supply chains.

Preventing a new era of green extractivism requires a fundamental shift in approach. We must move beyond technical fixes and directly challenge the coercive political-security structures built from the outset to undermine accountability.

Until we dismantle the architecture of opacity, the wealth generated by the energy transition will continue to enrich the few at the expense of the many. DM