Off-Earth Geopolitics

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of what some consider to be a new ‘space age’ which has featured the rapid expansion of human activity in outer space. The exponential growth of commercial satellite communications, the mining of asteroids and other celestial bodies, and the establishment of permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars are just a few of the projects planned or already underway that are profoundly reworking the nature and scope of the human presence off-Earth. A defining feature of this new ‘space age’ is the increasing diversity of actors involved, both in the form of new ‘space-faring’ states developing space programmes or investing in space-based economic development, and an emerging array of private actors pursuing profit in the commercial development of space-based industries from mapping and logistics to mining and tourism. The move from space exploration to space exploitation, and from state science to commercial investment, has cast outer space as a new frontier for investment and accumulation, altering the political economic and geopolitical matrix within which human activity off-Earth is taking shape, and testing established concepts and practices of sovereignty, territory and property.  

Although still a nascent subfield, a growing body of scholarship on the ‘geographies of outer space’ is emerging within the discipline of geography. This workshop seeks to contribute to these emerging discussions by focusing on the geopolitical dimensions of the expanding human presence off-earth.  We do so in order to critically locate the geographic imaginaries framing recent developments within the traditions of geopolitical thought, to understand how geopolitical relations have been reworked around outer space through the development of socio-technical assemblages both on- and off-earth, and how established and novel modes of authority and regulation are being mobilised in the process. We pay critical attention to how these formations are developing within non-Western and non-traditional ‘space faring’ contexts.  

This workshop thus aims to bring together international scholars whose research engages with the emerging off-earth geopolitics and helps us situate them within the histories and critical traditions of political geography and related fields. We will cover the following broad themes: (1) Space colonization, (2) infrastructural politics, (3) law, policy and justice, (4) intellectual histories of off-earth thought, (5) the politics and history of national space programmes, (5) gender, culture and representation, and (6) environmental politics and geoengineering. This workshop is generously funded by the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford and the Department of Geography at Trinity College Dublin.