Greenland has long been the focus of various states due to its geographical location off the coast of North America, but also due to the abundance of raw materials, as can be seen in the paper "Greenland, object of desire, second act" in "International Politics" (July/August 2025): p. 106-111.

From a raw materials perspective, Greenland is becoming increasingly attractive (also due to global warming and the retreat of the glaciers). Greenland sees the increased extraction of raw materials as one way of becoming (more) financially independent. In the past, ore, coal and industrial minerals such as graphite and fluorite have been mined in Greenland. Information on this can be found in the DERA report "Greenland's mineral resource potential".

Greenland's mineral wealth and the resulting covetousness of "non-Greenlanders" can be gauged, for example, by reading the individual issues of the series "Geology and ore: exploration and mining in Greenland" and the USGS factsheet "Assessment of undiscovered conventional oil and gas resources of the West Greenland-East Canada Province" from 2023.