Why IR theorists have not ‘looked up’

To make sense of political developments in the coming 50 years, IR theory would benefit from a reorientation towards planetary politics as constituted by the relations between the Earth and outer space. Before we move on to make this case, it is vital that we directly address the sceptics in our audience, and specifically those who may be inclined to see outer space politics as a minor, epiphenomenal, or speculative concern when compared to the core issues of IR. We therefore begin by identifying the grounds to believe that space might not be so relevant to IR theorists, discussing three common fallacies.

Looking up from a flat-Earth

Dispensing with these fallacies is only the first step required in our efforts to confront our terrestrial biases. The next step involves more fundamental reform of the discipline’s set of shared assumptions about what makes up the social and political world. The first terrestrial assumption is ‘flat-Earthism’. This involves conceptualising politics as a phenomenon that plays out on a two-dimensional plane that roughly corresponds to a Mercator projection of the Earth’s surface. ‘Flat-Earthism’ has tended to limit our ability to see how political power operates through three-dimensional space. To be more precise, we have tended to primarily focus on how power is extended, prevented, or relationally constituted horizontally across two-dimensional representations of the Earth’s surface, rather than vertically, upwards into the air, or downwards below the ground.

To develop this point, we find it helpful to move away from more abstract generalisations about the ‘discipline of IR’, in order to focus on the way this assumption surfaces in a specific body of thought. In the following account, we limit ourselves to a discussion of flat-Earthism, and efforts to move beyond it, in ‘anti-colonial IR’. The term ‘anti-colonial IR’ refers to strands of research in International Relations that engage critically with colonial institutions, decolonisation processes, and their legacies. In this context, we include within this broad umbrella work that formally affiliates with the labels ‘decolonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ theory, and related works taking place under the banners of critical theory, constructivism, etc. These different bodies of work share a concern for documenting and analysing (a) colonial institutions and practices; (b) forms of domination engendered by these institutions and practices; and (c) historical legacies of colonialism in both material residues and ideational frameworks. In choosing anti-colonial IR as an exemplar, we are not denying the significance of other brands of IR theory such as ‘liberalism’, ‘realism’ etc. and their potential contributions to theorising the politics of outer space.Footnote ²² Instead, we merely believe that anti-colonial theorising serves as a useful example for thinking through both the merits and limitations of the flat-Earthist assumption.

We can begin to get a sense of the origins of flat-Earthism by recognising how this assumption first appeared in colonial practice and thought. For example, a flat-Earthist imagery underlay the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the ‘new’ land outside of Europe that colonists had supposedly ‘discovered’ into a Spanish West and a Portuguese East. This was done through the invocation of a single line of demarcation between these two zones and gave licence to colonial authorities based in Europe to extend their sovereign authority horizontally to large parts of the Americas. The flat-Earthist concept of a world divided by a single line between East and West created the hope of a clear and simple division between competing sovereigns.

Flat-Earthist ideas underpinned and simplified the empires’ broad jurisdictional claims to territory which colonists hardly knew, let alone controlled. Yet flat-Earthist ideas could also be turned against colonial institutions of rule, as they underpinned efforts to undermine the legitimacy of European colonial claims many years later. For example, the principle of self-determination was largely ‘flat-Earthist’. This principle differentiated the entirety of the landed surface of the globe into a series of two-dimensional territories to be ruled by the people and/or their leaders. It also set rules to prevent a state from extending its power too far into the territory of another. Using this image of the world as a series of claims to distinct territories, the Declaration on Decolonization expressed a common commitment to ‘noninterference in the internal affairs of all States, and respect for the sovereign rights of all peoples and their territorial integrity’.Footnote ²³

As this example suggests, while flat-Earthism may have emerged within a modernist order in which European empires were dominant, the assumption is not inherently wedded to the cause of extending or maintaining European colonial rule. This adaptability partly explains why anti-colonial IR theory has been able to generate meaningful critiques of coloniality without necessarily abandoning the flat-Earthist presumption it produced. For example, anti-colonial IR theory has made a variety of critiques of the proliferation of (post-)colonial inequalities, including through geopolitical principles such as core/periphery, the global colour line, and Global North/Global South.Footnote ²⁴ These critiques, urgent and critical as they are (and will continue to be), remain concerned with the horizontal extension of power across two-dimensional space. As such, they also continue to rely on spatial imaginaries of political relations as projected onto a two-dimensional map, which gives meaning to the terms ‘North’ or ‘South’.

Going beyond these imaginaries of two-dimensional space, researchers have also played with flat-Earthist representations in ways that expose the limitations of the assumption. A good example is offered by Olivia Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam. They move anti-colonial thinking beyond the limited geopolitical framework of a Global North and Global South by pointing to the greater complexity of post-colonial political geographies. They point out that migration from the Global South to the North has produced a ‘global South in the North’ where migrant communities take up decolonial politics within the social settings and political institutions of the former colonial ‘metropole’.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, they point out that global capitalist production systems have resulted in a ‘global North in the Global South’ where elite groups located in former colonial states take on and reapply the logics and ideologies of coloniality to their fellow citizens and jurisdictions, from positions of extreme privilege and wealth.Footnote ²⁶ Crucially, here we have an example of how anti-colonial thinking can challenge the specific forms of flat-Earthist spaces that are reified by colonial thinking, while still not fundamentally rejecting or replacing the preferred flat-Earthist assumption that lies beneath it.

Given this relative conceptual ‘plasticity’ of a flat-Earthist assumption, it should come as no surprise that many inquiries into the international politics of outer space retain traces of a flat-Earthist understanding of spatialities. This is especially the case for studies that centre a world of territorial states in their understanding of space politics.Footnote ²⁷ These lines of inquiry remain relevant, as states continue to be the main actors in most space exploration endeavours. Space exploration is financed by states, which are engaging with space for Earthly purposes – for example to address security concerns or for the possible resource gains.Footnote ²⁸ While the current moment sees the increasing entry of non-state actors into the space sector, these actors tend to work closely together with state actors. Legally, states remain responsible for activities carried out in outer space by non-state actors, and as such states are required to authorise and continuously supervise these activities.Footnote ²⁹ Therefore, traditional lines of IR scholarship focused on the balance of power, war, and security that consider an outer space dimension can benefit from staying within such a statist spatial perspective.

Yet this also means that in many of these geopolitical formulations, outer space continues to play the role of a ‘side dish’ to the ‘main course’ which is served up back on a ‘flat-Earth’. In these formulations, the realm of politics remains constituted by power imbalances between or among territorial nation states, and the air and the sky are recognised as merely the means through which such power is obtained and expressed. While the political dynamics of a ‘flat-Earth’ help us understand what is at stake in outer space politics, from interstate politics to international inequalities, what remains underdeveloped is an attempt to theorise the new ways in which politics takes shape as influential actors increase their capacity to access outer space.

In this sense, it is important to recognise that the spatial norms we have developed to understand a ‘flat-Earth’ often prove inadequate when we begin to apply them to outer space. Jill Stuart draws our attention to this problem in ongoing struggles over who owns the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS is a research laboratory, run by five space agencies, that orbits the Earth at 420 km altitude, beyond any territorial claims of national airspace.Footnote ³⁰ While the ISS is thus not beholden to the principle of territoriality on Earth, international treaties negotiated for the ISS still ‘provide a unique system of governance that establishes rule over the “territory” of the station’.Footnote ³¹ The recreation of territoriality in space is done specifically by giving the ‘responsibility over individual component parts of the station to the member partner that launched it’.Footnote ³² This, as Stuart writes, has generated an unwieldy outcome: ‘the station is a sort of Franken-station, with its component parts physically connected and interdependent, but where those parts are ultimately sections of territory belonging to individual partners’.Footnote ³³

This shows that the problem is not simply that the spatial principles we have established for a ‘flat-Earth’ become insufficient in space, but that power itself assumes spatial forms that require new understandings and concepts. In the example above, attempts were made to redeploy a flat-Earthist spatial ontology to the governance of the ISS. Parts of the station remained subject to the launching state’s ‘flat’ domestic legislation, even as they were propelled into space, far beyond this state’s traditional territory. Yet the result is not a continuation of Earthly territoriality in space, but rather an entirely new spatial form. As a spatial form, the station has become an amalgamation of different territorial jurisdictions as tied to each constitutive part of the station. The ISS connects these national territories, which on Earth remain far apart, into one physically interdependent object. As it circles Earth, this new composite object challenges conventional notions of territorial integrity. The spatial form of the ISS, as well as many others emerging through outer space developments, thus cannot simply be reduced to a flat-Earthist ontology.

To address these new spatial forms, IR theorists could draw more heavily on developments in parallel disciplines. For the past several decades, social scientists have been critiquing and moving beyond statist and ‘flat’ assertions of political space. One of the most promising developments has involved the study of the ‘vertical’ and ‘volumetric’ character of space and power, and more specifically actions, infrastructures, and processes which are situated either above or underneath the Earth’s surface.Footnote ³⁴ Much of this work has taken a direct interest in the manner in which states and other powerful political actors have attempted to extend their power vertically by (a) physically occupying parts of the Earth’s atmosphere or the oceanic depths; (b) augmenting their power over the Earth’s surface by developing technologies, including planes and drones, submarines, and rockets that are situated at a distance from the Earth’s surface; and (c) laying claim to and apportioning rights to volumetric space through the development of no-fly zones, mineral deposits, or fish reserves.

This work on verticality and volume has further demonstrated that the flat-Earthist spatial cosmology engendered by coloniality was itself an abstraction from the reality of historical processes. Contrary to its representation on colonial maps, the projection of colonial power has always been three-dimensional. From the developments in astronomy that allowed for the improvements in European navigational systems, to the gradually expanding capacity to create value out of colonial possessions through mining technology, to the radical impact of airpower in shaping 20th-century political relations, there has been a constant interaction between, on the one hand, surface-level politics and, on the other, dynamics occurring in vertical dimensions. It is important to understand the exploration and militarisation of outer space as connected to these prior colonial forms of vertical politics. Indeed, coloniality is implicit in every reference to space as a ‘Final Frontier’ and plainly present in the defining rhetorical moments of space history and space culture.Footnote ³⁵ From its earliest days, NASA’s agenda has been shaped by a strong analogic link between public exultations of past conquests and conquests to come.Footnote ³⁶

Yet there are also ways in which outer space presents new forms and challenges, which we can start to grasp by foregrounding the vertical dimension. It may help us to consider how an appreciation of verticality can enrich anti-colonial theories in IR specifically by thinking through a specific empirical example: the Bogotá Declaration. In the 1970s, many post-colonial states were opposed to the leading idea of turning space into a global commons as proposed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The idea of a global commons favoured the interests of those states that were already capable of launching rockets, controlling satellites, and conducting missions beyond the Earth’s orbit. As Jason Beery argues, by constructing outer space as ‘global’ rather than ‘international’, leading space powers ensured that there would be ‘a very stark difference between the laws that governed outer space and those that governed terrestrial sovereign territories’.Footnote ³⁷ In essence, a ‘cosmopolitan’ understanding of sovereignty only served to exacerbate (post-)colonial inequalities among states and peoples back on a flat-Earth. Furthermore, some post-colonial states had a different asset they wanted to leverage in this unfolding space race: their equatorial location. Recognising this inequality, Brazil, Colombia, Congo, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, and Zaire banded together to assert their claim over their skies through the Bogotá Declaration. In the formulation of the Bogotá Declaration, territorial sovereignty would not only extend upwards into a nation’s airspace, but stretch vertically deep past the Earth’s atmosphere, to give these seven equatorial countries authority over the rapidly expanding infrastructure of war-making, surveillance, and wealth generation that was being built above their heads.

This claim to orbital sovereignty did not go down well with the leading ‘space race’ powers. According to the latter, the principle of territorial sovereignty could not be extended out and beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. They argued that extending sovereignty upwards ad infinitum – in the same way as airspace is governed – would generate a kaleidoscopic form of sovereignty in outer space, consisting of constantly shifting claims to different parts of different celestial bodies. After all, the Earth is constantly rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun, while our solar system is moving through the Milky Way within an expanding universe. Wilfred Jenks, the lawyer defending the US case against the Bogotá Declaration at the United Nations, therefore argued that ‘a projection into space of sovereignties based on particular areas of the Earth’s surface would give us a series of adjacent irregularly shaped cones with a constantly changing content. Celestial bodies would move in and out of these cones all the time’.Footnote ³⁸ Instead, the ‘space race’ powers argued that the cosmopolitan principle of rule originally outlined in the Outer Space Treaty should be maintained.

These competing claims point us to the stakes involved in theorising politics beyond Earth. Political practices and organising principles, such as territorial sovereignty, do not necessarily mean the same thing in space and are bound to be reformulated and contested. While the positions of the parties in this dispute were clearly defined by competing national and state interests, they were compelled to reconstitute their claims to domination (United States) and non-domination (Bogotá signatories) in a new idiom, adapted to the vertical reality of outer space. For the Bogotá signatories, this involved simply stretching a flat-Earthist claim vertically to its maximum extent to claim their fair share of outer space resources. For the US representatives, it involved establishing a hard break at a certain elevation, between the Earth’s sovereign and territorial property regime and the construction of a new cosmopolitan realm in which their technological superiority would afford them near-complete supremacy.

As this example suggests, thinking through core questions of sovereignty, power, and domination has compelled political actors to reformulate or move beyond their flat-Earthist assumptions and add vertical depth to their claims to power and authority. The changing forms of domination and contestation this gives rise to should be seen as closely connected to the three-dimensional projection of power on Earth itself, as there are many parallels between the high modernist aspirations of conquest by space explorers and histories of colonial conquest on Earth. Yet we have also demonstrated that there are ways in which this convergence of modernity and coloniality, often theorised through the colonial matrix of power, is taking new forms in outer space.Footnote ³⁹ Inequalities are not simply reproduced by activities which occur beyond the Earth’s atmosphere but are profoundly transformed, for example through the equator as a new axis of power or through constructions of outer space as a global commons. It is by challenging and departing from flat-Earthist theoretical assumptions that we can examine how these transformations play out in practice.

In so doing, it is important to keep in mind that there are many ways of thinking that have never been flat-Earthist, including Indigenous cosmologies. While ‘there is no single Indigenous view about the significance of space programs’ or about the meaning and significance of human interactions with space more generally, space does figure prominently within many Indigenous cosmologies.Footnote ⁴⁰ Many – if not most – Indigenous cosmologies have always been more-than-terrestrial, ‘oriented to the Sky as well as the ground’.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, M. Jane Young recounts that when a group of Inuit people in Alaska were told of the Moon landing, they replied ‘We didn’t know this was the first time you white people had been to the moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time.’Footnote ⁴² In this way, ‘Indigenous people have always been engaged with the worlds beyond the Earth, in ways that often stood counter to accepted “settler” conventions of space exploration’.Footnote ⁴³ Emergent forms of Indigenous futurism build upon these historical cosmologies to understand relational connections between the Earth and the wider cosmos, conjuring ways of interacting with outer space that do not end in conquest.Footnote ⁴⁴

In this sense, theorising politics beyond Earth is not about IR ‘discovering’ outer space or starting completely anew, but about connecting to those ways of thinking that allow us to ask (and tentatively answer) urgent questions about the momentous and often alarming political phenomena that emerge. This includes genealogies of vertical theorising and Indigenous cosmologies as well as other imaginative modes of thinking that get us beyond the theoretical presumption of a flat-Earth. In this way, we can question – rather than assume – the extent to which geopolitical principles (such as territorial sovereignty, but also core/periphery, Global North/Global South) capture the forms of power and domination that emerge beyond Earth. In many cases, human engagement with outer space may challenge the principles and distinctions that are central to the most urgent Earthly political issues, and our theorisations thereof. This means that for anti-colonial IR theorists in particular, and we would suggest IR theorists more generally, the challenge is to underline the connections between outer space and Earthly political struggles, while also seeing how these struggles are themselves deepened and transformed in outer space.

Provincialising human habitation

Flat-Earthist assumptions have been particularly adaptable, and therefore durable, components of IR theory. This durability can be partly explained by the fact that this assumption has been buttressed by a second terrestrial assumption in IR: ‘human habitationism’. This assumption holds that developments in outer space will form a repetition or extension of politics as it has emerged on the habitable surface of our planet. While human politics on Earth has developed in very specific material circumstances, such as 9.8 m/s² gravity, oxygen-rich air, moderate temperatures, and atmospheric pressure, the assumption is that politics will work the same way regardless of these circumstances. Even to us writing this article, these circumstances are ‘normal’, as they allow us to sit down on a chair, maintain a degree of thermal comfort, and breathe unsupported by oxygen systems.

In space, the material conditions vastly differ from those experienced on Earth. The Earth’s surface experiences atmospheric pressure as gravity pulls objects toward the centre of the planet, giving weight to everything. In space, especially in microgravity, objects experience a state of continuous free fall, resulting in a sensation of weightlessness. Space is a near-perfect vacuum, almost devoid of the matter and molecules that make up the Earth’s atmosphere, affecting how materials behave and interact. Additionally, Earth’s atmosphere helps regulate temperature by trapping heat, while in space, there is a vast temperature range due to the lack of an atmosphere to retain or conduct heat. Spacecraft can experience extreme heat when exposed to the Sun and extreme cold in shadowed areas. Finally, space is exposed to various forms of radiation, including solar radiation, galactic cosmic rays, and other high-energy particles, whereas we are partly shielded from this on our home planet through the atmosphere and the Earth’s magnetic field.

While these extraterrestrial forces are generally acknowledged as a challenge for astronautical engineering, as space technologies need to be improved and updated continuously to withstand the extreme conditions, they have yet to be fully integrated in the way we think about the politics of outer space. Instead, the radically different material conditions present in outer space are generally not considered politically significant at all. Faced with the challenge of demonstrating that outer space is not an isolated, unique, or inconsequential realm of political life, IR scholars paving the way for the study of outer space have come to instead emphasise the commonalities with Earthly politics. Bleddyn E. Bowen, for example, states that ‘there is a common perception that outer space is a politically different or separate realm to Earth’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, he argues: ‘For better and worse, humanity’s use of outer space is shaped by Terran politics, and the solar system a rich vista waiting for the humanities to join the engineers and the scientists.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Outer space is really ‘just another place where human politics continues as it does on Earth’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In this way, political continuity is established between inner space (Earth and its atmosphere) and outer space (beyond the atmosphere).

It is tempting to theorise outer space as a mere canvas for Earthly politics. For many space enthusiasts, the aim is precisely to extend the realm of human existence and influence towards outer space. In space exploration, it is often assumed that ‘the drive to expand beyond earthly limits is a natural and inevitable characteristic of an amorphously defined human subject or species’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As humans advance scientific discovery about planet Earth, they will naturally seek to extend their view further outwards, towards the limitless horizon that is outer space. While commercial and scientific space exploration endeavours differ in some critical respects, they are united in their aim to expand the realm of the humanly possible. In an era of increasing awareness of the ‘planetary boundaries’ of human activity, space exploration forms a continuing outlet for expansionist fantasies, whether through dreams of an interstellar gold rush or plans for humanity as an interplanetary species. ‘Within most expansionist narratives, space exploration becomes represented as a shared and perhaps even global human quest: ‘a profoundly human aspiration that unites all people in all places’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Such imaginaries are not only highly anthropocentric, placing the human at the centre of the wider universe, but also geocentric (or Earth-centric), in that they interpret the nature and significance of outer space through Earthly frameworks and regimes of power. Although these activities are oriented towards outer space as a literal and physical place beyond the human world, outer space itself becomes subsumed in terrestrial aspirations and fantasies. Space critics tend to criticise these lofty ambitions, yet in so doing, they also emphasise the continuity between Earthly politics and outer space. In their views, space exploration should not be seen as a shared aspiration, but as the vehicle of a particular set of interests which extend human disparities in wealth and power.Footnote ⁵⁰ Through space endeavours, such as new frontiers of resource mining, the geopolitics of extraction and wealth creation are extended beyond Earth.Footnote ⁵¹ While the bulk of criticism tends to be on commercial space enterprise, these voices have strongly emphasised the deepening connections between space science and the commercial space industry. The science of outer space, Dickens and Ormrod write, ‘is now being deployed to humanise the cosmos in ways that not only reproduce the social order, but extend this order indefinitely into the cosmos’.Footnote ⁵²

These poignant and necessary critiques often retain a sense of parallelism between ‘inner space’ and ‘outer space’. While we are supportive of these efforts to consider urgent political phenomena emerging in outer space, we believe that further theoretical steps are necessary. We argue that it is important to theorise outer space as part of the political realm without simply equating it to Earthly spaces. This is because outer space, as an environment highly different from Earth, offers distinct possibilities and dangers for politics. The extreme material conditions of space influence how human endeavours in space are planned and regulated, as scientists, lawyers, and politicians transform Earthly frameworks to these specific circumstances.Footnote ⁵³ These material circumstances are also expected to influence the feasibility and methods of emergent space initiatives – for example, space resource extraction – as the specific composition of different celestial bodies such as asteroids and the Moon shapes how geopolitical tensions and conflicts over resource ownership and utilisation may play out.Footnote ⁵⁴ Finally, as we discuss in more depth below, these conditions impact what human settlements in outer space and their political relations may come to look like in the coming decades. Therefore, material conditions are key to studying politics beyond Earth.

Understanding how the politics of outer space is influenced by its material conditions fits within longer trends of materialist theorising. As we discuss below, scholars in and beyond IR have already started conducting the work of considering the significance of different kinds of Earthly material conditions to the conduct of politics. The aim in these sorts of works is not to argue for some renewed kind of environmental determinism, but rather to understand how political visions and practices intersect with material circumstances. In the age of empire, for example, colonisers deemed environments with tropical climates less ‘suitable’ for politics.Footnote ⁵⁵ Regions of the globe with climates similar to Western Europe were sought out for colonisation, whereas those with more tropical climates were deemed inappropriate for the flourishing of civilisation. To establish a sense of thermal comfort for Europeans, climate control was introduced in the colonies, and this was also thought to lay the conditions for advanced political organisation over time.

In recent years, scholars have turned to the study of spaces that are often considered to be on the fringes of the political realm due to their inhospitable or harsh physical conditions, such as oceanic or polar environments.Footnote ⁵⁶ In so doing, they have had to contend with IR’s core assumptions, which often inhibit an understanding of the political significance of different material environments. The challenge scholars face is that, even today, it is assumed that politics works the same regardless of material circumstances. ‘IR has been a patho-logical “landlubber discipline”’, Benjamin de Carvalho and Halvard Leira argue, as it either avoids engagement with the sea or regards it merely as an extension of land.Footnote ⁵⁷ Practices developed within highly specific material conditions, such as a land-based existence and moderate temperatures, cloud understandings of what political organisation may look like elsewhere. These conditions, which are generally most favourable to human habitation and host the largest human population densities on Earth, loom large in our understanding of politics in a more general sense.

To interrogate these assumed conditions, prior scholarship has identified how the conduct of politics in different kinds of environments stretches the limits of established understandings, including familiar political categories and institutions.Footnote ⁵⁸ This is because the characteristics of an environment make certain political courses of action more or less likely. As Daniel Lambach notes, ‘in a crude physical sense, the environmental properties of a space matter for politics – the governance of space works differently on land, on the high seas and in outer space’.Footnote ⁵⁹ While political practices are not determined by their environment, they necessarily need to be adapted to the physical conditions in which they take place. The materiality of the sea, for example, evades conventional understandings of political boundaries. Water is in constant motion, and as a result, its territory and location are not fixed, which means that the sea ‘challenges processes of bordering with a particular intensity not found on land’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This kind of understanding is not based on an understanding of the environment as an ‘empty space against which human “things” move’, but rather on the presumption that the environment itself is made up of all kinds of processes, in which humans play a part.Footnote ⁶¹ Therefore, challenging the assumption of human habitationism is not solely about acknowledging the material characteristics of different environments, but about interrogating how material processes intersect with situated histories of political governance and control.

Therefore, studies have outlined in a concrete, practical sense how politics has come to be conducted differently in environments due to the influence of material characteristics. Lambach has studied the adaptation of political practices to the ‘extreme environment’ of the Arctic Circle. He outlines the extreme physical aspects of human bodily presence in the Arctic: ‘[the] ability to withstand cold and darkness, the bodily risks of icy waters and the psychosomatic effects of isolation and confinement in small habitable spaces’.Footnote ⁶² These challenges shape politics in the Arctic, as they mean that ‘governance is by necessity more distant and detached, mediated by technologies of surveillance and control’.Footnote ⁶³ In a similar way, Janet Martin-Nielsen recounts how US forces post–World War II were engaged in an ‘other cold war’ in the Arctic: the struggle with an icy environment that posed a threat to American capabilities in the region.Footnote ⁶⁴ The US desire to control Greenland, which was considered important to safeguarding national security, was complicated by the island’s remote geography, challenging climate, and barren landscape.Footnote ⁶⁵ Faced with polar white-outs, drifting snow, and fog, the US military resigned itself to what she calls a ‘détente’, the decision to work ‘with the cold rather than against it’ by using snow and ice as building materials for military operations and installations, while relinquishing grand ambitions of hegemonic control over the Arctic.Footnote ⁶⁶

These analyses allude to the potential of challenging persistent assumptions of human habitationism in our conceptions of politics. Rather than assuming that politics works the same way regardless of physical circumstances, scholars should investigate how politics has come to be conducted differently outside of the most densely populated zones of human habitation, not only by state governments and their militaries, as in the examples above, but also within longer histories of Indigenous political organisation in places such as the Arctic.

This is of utmost relevance to theorising the politics of outer space. After all, oceanic and polar environments have long been considered analogues for the conditions of space, and drawing analogies to these environments formed a key part of international deliberations on how human activities in space ought to be governed.Footnote ⁶⁷ Due to the extreme pressure and lack of oxygen, space agencies such as NASA have long conducted missions in the deep seas to test technologies and to find clues to what life might look like on other planets.Footnote ⁶⁸ Because of the isolation and lack of vegetation, human endeavours in Antarctica are often thought to provide a preview of what human presence in the solar system might come to resemble, that is, limited outposts rather than permanent settlements.Footnote ⁶⁹ The harsh physical characteristics of these environments not only require specific technologies, practices, and protocols to sustain human life but also make the materials conventionally used for building and supporting human societies notoriously challenging to govern and control.Footnote ⁷⁰

Due to these challenging material conditions, spacefaring has never been a strictly human endeavour. From the dogs and monkeys on early rocket missions to the plants and rodents involved in ISS experiments, non-human explorers (or hostages?) have always been an integral part of space exploration.Footnote ⁷¹ To avoid sacrificing humans in experimental missions, animals with a similar physiology were selected as the first astronauts. From the early days of space exploration, the use of animal astronauts in experiments aimed to tackle essential questions about the fundamental survival of biological beings in space.Footnote ⁷² These inquiries spanned the examination of physiological changes arising from space flights to ensuring the safety of space vehicles and equipment. It was therefore important that these animals would share as many characteristics as possible with humans, yet not be human.Footnote ⁷³ These animals made possible the human ‘bridge to the future’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Space exploration would similarly be impossible without mechanical explorers, the most important one being the rover.Footnote ⁷⁵ In recent decades, robotic vehicles have become such a crucial part of the human access to and view of outer space that some argue that the conventional distinction between humans and robots no longer applies in space.Footnote ⁷⁶

Paradoxically, these elaborate experimental and technological attempts at accessing space, while built on the premise of the human capacity to transcend their planetary home, only underline how much human lives depend on the existence of Earthly habitable conditions. Human spacefaring is only made possible through the creation of these very same habitable conditions within the radically different environments of outer space. The use of animals with a similar physiology as the first astronauts reveals the inescapable animality of humans themselves, that is, all the commonalities that humans share with other oxygen-dependent, 9.8 m/s² gravity-bound creatures on planet Earth. While the fact that non-humans have been made to travel on board of human-built spaceships has been rooted in the belief of human control over the environment, including fantasies of further expanding this control out into space, its underlying rationale underlines the very real limits of human control.

In this sense, extraterrestrial spaces – like Earthly oceanic or polar spaces – confront us with the limits of human habitational thinking. While scholars have already started considering to what extent different Earthly governance approaches, from libertarianism to communitarianism, might be applicable to human settlements in space, it is crucial to analyse precisely how any such approach would run up against these habitational limits.Footnote ⁷⁷ Paving the way for such analyses is David Valentine’s work, which argues for the insufficiency and impossibility of extending terrestrial conceptions of politics to Mars, the planet most often subjected to expansionist fantasies.Footnote ⁷⁸ Valentine contends that when humans attempt to project political formations such as capitalism, socialism, or settler-colonialism onto a possible Martian settlement, they fail to acknowledge that these phenomena depend on specific configurations of material conditions that ‘cannot travel beyond Earth as cargo’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Not only is the Martian ground fundamentally incompatible with terrestrial life, but even the building materials found on Mars defy world-making practices by Earthlings.

The stakes are high, as terrestrial modes of political thinking are not only incompatible with an extraterrestrial world, but they are potentially deadly. As soon as conditions for human habitability are not present, such as on Mars, any form of action becomes immediately and fundamentally connected to survival. Any Martian settlement ‘would need to incorporate relations among physics, potential human conflict, energy needs, and unanticipated interactions with microbes or Mars’s persistent chemistry’.Footnote ⁸⁰ These fragile relations, Valentine emphasises, are vital: ‘Crucially, any failure, relation, mistake, or unforeseen problem in any of those relations at any scale could end the entire world for everyone and everything within its boundaries because of Mars’s incompatibilities with terrestrial forms of life.’Footnote ⁸¹ Other celestial bodies beyond Mars, with their specific physical and geological conditions, will bring their own unique challenges. Extraterrestrial spaces are not blank canvases for the human imagination, as they all provide distinct challenges to terrestrial political orders.Footnote ⁸²

This is important because it provides a starting point for theorising the politics of outer space as more than a mere extension of Earthly politics. In theorising outer space as a mirror image of Earthly politics, we lose sight of the significance of outer space as a very particular environment, one that undermines most human attempts at world-building due to the absence of habitable conditions. Aside from seeing spacefaring as a more-than-human endeavour, which is dependent on the agencies of non-human beings, materials, and technologies, it also entails navigating anti-human forces and elements, that is, forces and elements that are deadly to humans and destructive to their technologies. As in the Arctic, challenging environmental conditions do not eliminate but transform the possibility and conduct of politics. The further we move away from Earth’s most densely populated zones of human habitation, the more challenging it becomes to sustain dominant political forms, and the more urgent the grappling with different material conditions. These material conditions challenge and transform the conduct of politics as developed on Earth. This raises new questions that cannot be answered by bringing extraterrestrial environments into the fold of IR’s theoretical apparatuses, but by provincialising the terrestrial grounds of political practices and ideas.

In outer space, human habitability therefore cannot be taken as a given but becomes a highly fraught and tenuous achievement, demanding all kinds of technological and political innovations. Because of the vulnerability of human-built technological systems and relational networks of life forms in space, any kind of political order is a unique, risky arrangement. Consequently, in off-Earth environments, no entity, force, or agent, including the human, can claim a privileged or ontologically secure status.Footnote ⁸³ As Valentine contends, theoretical frameworks from Earth that emphasise the agency of non-human actors are insufficient in comprehending this unique ‘alien relationality’, formed in the absence of familiar terrestrial conditions.Footnote ⁸⁴ Political arrangements in space stations and settlements will necessarily be shaped by this alien relationality and thus take up unfamiliar forms. Even more ‘distant’ modes of engagement with outer space, from space resource extraction to space security, are also unlikely to produce an extension or logical conclusion of human history and politics as it has emerged on the habitable surface of planet Earth, as the material conditions of space demand that these phenomena manifest differently.Footnote ⁸⁵ Indeed, as James Clay Moltz has argued, the material circumstances of space environments compelled a process of ‘environmental learning’ throughout the Cold War, whereby the United States and the Soviet Union adapted repertoires of security due to the heightened dangers of radiation effects and orbital debris.Footnote ⁸⁶

Bringing this back to debates on planetary politics, we can similarly see Earthly habitability as a specific and highly vulnerable outcome of geological, biological, and ecological processes, especially as they intersect with more-than-human agencies. Even when situated within the so-called Goldilocks zone, the narrow region around the sun in which conditions are ‘just right’ for temperatures to be moderate and for liquid water to exist, human habitability is a rare occurrence.Footnote ⁸⁷ ‘You have to remember that oxygen was toxic for the first creatures’, states Dipesh Chakrabarty.Footnote ⁸⁸ The first mass extinction of species occurred when a photosynthesising bacterium appeared and released high levels of oxygen into the atmosphere.Footnote ⁸⁹ Therefore, ‘if you look at the story of the oxygen in the air from our point of view, it’s a blessing, but if you look at it from the point of view of bacteria that subsisted mainly on nitrogen, it was a [catastrophe]’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The historicity and uniqueness of human habitability is especially important to recognise in the face of fears of an ‘uninhabitable Earth’.Footnote ⁹¹ As recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections estimate that the habitability of parts of the planet will be severely threatened within this century due to rising temperatures, flooding, and sea-level rise, human habitation gains an increasingly central stage in political thought and action.Footnote ⁹²

For IR theorists, we would therefore like to end with the provocation to further interrogate, rather than taking for granted, the politics of human habitation. Instead of assuming that politics works a particular way regardless of physical circumstances, we encourage thorough theorisation of how human habitability is created, maintained, and undermined through concrete political practices – and for which particular groups of humans. This includes studying politics in places that are increasingly on the fringes of human habitability due to anthropogenic climate change, but also spaces that have historically been situated outside of the established zones of human habitation but are brought into the realm of human influence, such as off-Earth environments. Across these locales, we are confronted with material environments, forces, and conditions that evade and escape human domination, and which are ‘rebellious against the assemblages that seek to contain it’.Footnote ⁹³ In laying the groundwork for the theorisation of outer space, we situate its politics precisely at the point where histories of more-than-human action and these material forces meet.

Concluding remarks

Space is potentially infinite, but the potential for the humanisation of outer space is not. In this article, we have explored the prospects for IR theory to take some tentative steps into outer space, and the forms of theoretical understanding that are opened by these ventures. Contributing to ongoing attempts to theorise international relations through ‘planetary’ conceptions of politics, we have sought to open up lines of inquiry that stretch beyond the edge of our home planet. In particular, we have demonstrated that efforts to move IR theory beyond its flat-Earthist origins have the potential to bring into view new vertical forms of political power. Using the example of anti-colonial theory, we have explored how making IR theory three-dimensional can extend and nuance our understanding of the spatial characteristics of power dynamics and relations. Using the empirical illustration of the Bogotá Declaration, we showed how neo-colonial domination and resistance may take on new geometries and territorialities in outer space.

At the same time, our exploration of human habitationism and our efforts to think through this problem expose the very hard limits of the fantasies that suggest that Earth-level politics can simply and inevitably be lifted vertically up in the air, while also clarifying how habitability has always been hiding at the core of our understandings of politics. In contrast to common claims, and drawing on materialist thinking, we have made the case that it is insufficient and inaccurate to assume that terrestrial politics can simply be extended to extraterrestrial spaces if space advocates so desired. While Earthly forms of domination inform the visions and practices of space exploration, they run up against the limits of survival once humans and other species enter space. Beyond Earth, as well as in some extreme terrestrial environments, humans become fundamentally dependent on the technologies and non-humans that accompany them. A departure from the zones of human habitation therefore necessitates unique and risky political formations, and these political phenomena can better be understood by reorienting our terrestrial modes of theorising.

The goal of this piece has primarily been to expose the problems inherent in terrestrial assumptions and suggest the theoretical value involved in moving beyond them for particular lines of inquiry. However, we would also like to take this opportunity to suggest how scholars might seek to extend our theoretical understanding of space by actively researching outside the constraints of this limiting assumption. In our assessment, the most fruitful form of endeavour would be to ask more precisely how missions to extend humanity into outer space seek to overcome the constraints on habitability that we have identified, and what forms of domination these methods either explicitly warrant or indirectly anticipate. We believe that these are precisely the questions confronting scientists, engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, and public policymakers daily, as they work towards the goals of establishing a space station on the Moon, sending a mission to Mars, or even launching satellites into the Earth’s orbit. In developing practical answers to these problems, a variety of ‘experts’ are inventing the politics of outer space on the fly. Whereas much of this work goes unnoticed by IR theorists, there are already ongoing debates on the international politics and ethics of these developments. In journals such as Space Policy and Astropolitics, we find evidence of long-standing and principled discussions among scholars and practitioners about space militarisation, the extraction of resources on celestial bodies, and the need for environmental protection beyond Earth.

We believe it is essential that theorists within IR and its cognate disciplines become directly engaged in these discussions – as they are being decided within organisational settings that have the power to shape practices on the ground – to uncover the politics of space exploration and its most harmful manifestations. While we have argued for a renewed theorisation of the politics of outer space, we also wish to advocate for more empirically grounded approaches to space exploration, space science, and the space industry. We believe that such empirical work would constitute further grounds from which to bring into view the dangers and limits of space exploration endeavours, from space militarisation to space colonisation, and their dominant imaginaries. This entails not only engaging with existing space plans, but also connecting this research to budding examples of anti-colonial and environmental critiques in practice. Instead of staying silent on the momentous developments we are witnessing in outer space, or of reproducing the constitutive logics of these endeavours, this allows us to study and debate our relationship with outer space. This work entails a voyage not necessarily out to space itself (indeed, we could debate if and how going to space is even desirable) but into the heart of our own terrestrial consciousness, with its Earthly assumptions, priorities, and limits.