Photo credits:
Cristián Flores Fernández successfully defended his PhD thesis, Lithium, Green Hydrogen and the contested dynamics of green frontiers-making in Chile.
Cristián’s dissertation examines how Chile’s role as a strategic supplier of lithium and renewable energy for global decarbonization reshapes its territories and political economy. It analyzes how multi-scalar coalitions deploy legal, narrative, and institutional tools to produce “green frontiers,” expanding extraction into new spaces under the promise of promoting local economic development, while risking reproducing historical extractivist logics. The thesis concludes that making the transition truly transformative demands acknowledging its fundamentally political character — a disputed terrain of territory, sovereignty, and development — and opening spaces for substantive contestation of the uneven power dynamics that govern the global green economy.
Cristián completed his doctorate at the Geography Department under the supervision of Tobias Krüger (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). The defense took place on 4 May 2026, and the final degree is Magna cum laude.
Congratulations to Cristián for his outstanding achievement!
