Description
The past decade has seen a resurgence in discussion about the opportunities and dangers of outer space. Space exploration is increasingly included in national security strategies, yet there are very different interpretations of what security in space means and how to achieve it. Some see space as an extension of terrestrial security and link exploration with armament, leading to calls to avoid a space arms race. The second major strand of discussion centres on the need for security from space and those who exploit it. Here we find conversations about satellites, spying, and the neo imperial ambitions of a select few countries. Finally, there has been a rising tendency to treat space itself as the referent object of security. In this vein, stewardship and sustainability play a role in maintaining this common global good. This paper interrogates the referent objects of space discourse. Using a corpus of 415 national security and defence documents spanning from 1998-2022 and annual UN General Assembly resolutions on the peaceful uses of outer space, we perform a genealogy of the securitization of space. We employ sophisticated natural language processing technologies that enable us to identify, group, and classify semantically similar conceptual formulations. Our methodology allows us to explore change over time and see if the shifting referent object in space security discourse implies wider shifts in understandings of security.
