Title: Reshaping outer space’s geopolitical imaginations.
Topics: Political Geography
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Keywords: Geopolitical imagination, outer space, China, critical geopolitics
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 4/9/2021 06:25 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/9/2021 07:40 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 55
Authors:
Paloma Puente-Lozano, University Carlos III of Madrid (Spain)
Alexia Herring, University Carlos III of Madrid
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Abstract
Recent scholarship on material and theoretical transformations of
sovereignty has developed around its three-dimensional nature (Elden, 2013; Billé,
2019, 2020) as states and new actors strive in the global competition for power,
resources and new areas of geopolitical intervention and control. Rather than just a
flat surface, sovereignty has been recast as a volume to the extent that an increasingly
vertical (both subterranean and stratospheric) extension of sovereignty has been
underway over the last decades. Discussions as to how processes of territorialization
are brought to bear on these new realms and “ungoverned spaces” have then followed
(Collis, 2017; Lambach, 2019). Within this framework, outer space has received
renewed attention (Gangale, 2009; Leib, 2015; Badkul & Kumar, 2015; Klinger, 2019)
and critical astropolitics has set out to contest classical geopolitical assumptions made
about states’ policies and visions on outer space.
Within this framework, and joining current efforts deployed through critical popular
geopolitics (Dittmer and Dodds, 2008), this paper seeks to address current shifting
patterns in geopolitical imaginations on outer space due to China’s geopolitical current
and projected interventions (budgetary, infrastructural, logistical, rhetorical, etc.)
within the global (US-led but increasingly multi-actor and weaponized) space race.
Special attention will be paid to the way China’s geopolitical imagination about outer
space is informed by nationalist codes and images of scientific and peaceful nature (Su,
2010; Peoples, 2008). The paper thus aims at uncovering the meaning and rhetoric
strategies underwriting China’s geopolitical stance towards outer space.