Securing Outer Space

This edited volume analyses a number of controversial policies and strategies relating to Space activities, and to place these in a broader theoretical perspective. The book reveals the relationship between activities in Outer Space and terrestrial international relations.

Autorentext

Natalie Bormann teaches at the Department of Politics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. Previously she held a position at the Watson Insititute for International Studies, Brown University. She is the author of National Missile Defence and the Politics of US Identity: A Poststructuralist Critique.

Michael Sheehan is Professor of International Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea. His publications include The International Politics of Space; International Security: An Analytical Survey; National and International Security; Balance of Power: History and Theory; The Arms Race; and Arms Control: Theory and Practice.

Zusammenfassung
The challenges that space poses for political theory are profound. Yet until now, the exploration and utilization of space has generally reflected - but not challenged - the political patterns and impulses which characterized twentieth-century politics and International Relations. This edited volume analyses a number of controversial policies, and contentious strategies which have promoted space activities under the rubric of exploration and innovation, militarization and weaponization, colonization and commercialization. It places these policies and strategies in broader theoretical perspective in two key ways. Firstly, it engages in a reading of the discourses of space activities: exposing their meaning-producing practices; uncovering the narratives which convey certain space strategies as desirable, inevitable and seamless. Secondly, the essays suggest ways of understanding, and critically engaging with, the effects of particular space policies. The essays here seek to 'bring back space' into the realm of International Relations discourse, from which it has been largely removed, marginalized and silenced. The various chapters do this by highlighting how activities in outer space are always connected to earth-bound practices and performances of the every day. Securing Outer Space will be of great interest to students of space power, critical security studies and IR theory.

Inhalt

Introduction 1. Unbundling Sovereignty, Territory and the State in Outer Space: Two Approaches 2. Space Weapons - Dream, Nightmare or Reality? 3. Critical Astropolitics: The Geopolitics of Space Control and the Transformation of State Sovereignty 4. The Spaces between Us: The Gendered Politics of Outer Space 5. The Lost Dimension: A Spatial Reading of US Weaponisation of Space 6. Haunted Dreams: Critical Theory, Technology and the Militarization of Space 7. The (power) Politics of Space: The US Astropolitical Discourse on Global Dominance in the War on Terror 8. Between Blind Faith and Deep Scepticism: The 'Weaponisation of Space' and the Canadian Debate on Ballistic Missile Defence 9. The Mice that Soar: Smaller States Perspectives on Space Weaponisation 10. Profaning the Path to the Sacred: The Militarisation of the European Space Programme 11. Neo-Realism and the Galileo and GPS Negotiations 12. Pol Sci-Fi 101: Lessons from Science Fiction Television for Global and Outer Space Politics