The Astropolitical Gaze: A Geopolitical Criminology of the EU Space Resources Strategy

Activity: Lecture / Presentation › Professional

Description

Ensuring energy supply security is a core interest of the modern state, which has historically entailed the colonial geographic expansion of extractive industry and political influence, if not outright control, over sites of extraction. Plans for the extraction of space resources, such as the 2019 EU Space Resources Strategy, give insight into the increasing activity in space and the governance and policing thereof, and how, or if, the EU diverges from or reproduces past colonial expansionist patterns of exploitation and destruction. Despite existing space law, the policing of space resource extraction is on the frontiers of both governance and places that are governed and policed. The EU has a prominent role to play in how materials and environments beyond Earth are treated by state and non-state actors, which is an increasingly urgent matter as evidenced by recent events such as StarLink satellites taking a role in the Russia-Ukraine conflicti (Chabert 2023), space junk endangering existing space infrastructure such as the ISS (Lampkin & White 2023), and declarations by geopolitical rivals that the race for resources on the moon has already begun (Reuters 2023). In light of the destruction caused by colonial resource extraction to promote the security of European empires and given the enduring propensity for conflict over energy supplies within Europe, this paper draws lessons from that atrocious history to explore a future-oriented, critical analysis of the role of the EU in the governance and policing of space resource extraction. How EU governance and policing (policymaking) constructs and interprets outer space as a spatial imaginary represents its astropolitical gaze (Havercroft & Duvall 2009: 8-9), which will be explored in the EU Space Resources Strategy. Drawing from critical geopolitics, criminology, and science fiction, the authors propose a critique of EU plans for extractive industry in space.
Period22 May 2024
Event titleINTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON EU SPACE GOVERNANCE
Event typeConference
LocationBrussels, BelgiumShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

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