Global Space Politics
This initiative has followed rare earth elements from their frontiers of extraction to the satellite and satellite-linked technologies for which they are crucial, with particular attention to the use of these technologies by developing countries in the Global South and Indigenous communities living on the front lines of global change. This informs Dr. Klinger’s current book project, “Capitalizing the Cosmos,” which examines the resurgent space race built around reconfiguring outer space as a site of exclusive power, militarization, and extractive accumulation.
Contrary to robust international treaties that designate outer space as the common heritage of all humankind, states and private sector actors began in late 2015 to assert private property rights in an effort to enclose the final frontier. This set of research projects investigates the ongoing struggles to remake outer space either as a site of cowboy capitalism, a militarized high-ground, or an arena in which the most advanced and progressive of collectively held human values can be realized. In these struggles, unequal relations among states in terms of access to orbital space, historical responsibility for polluting near-earth environs, and South-South alliances outside of the hegemony of the Global North are manifest, particularly in joint satellite initiatives among developing countries to democratize the eye in the sky. Rather than viewing outer space as too remote for daily concern, Klinger’s research and writing illuminates the environmental geopolitics connecting human-environment relations on Earth and in outer space.