Description
In 1976, eight equatorial states issued the ‘Bogotá Declaration’, arguing that the allocation of orbital slots and spectrum through the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) filling regime is advantageous to spacefaring powers, and encloses the supposedly ‘province of all mankind’ under the rhetoric of openness. The declaration’s claim was dismissed as an attempt at national appropriation of a common asset of mankind. Fast forward to half-a-century, low-orbital mega constellations such as Starlink, OneWeb, and Kupier are occupying the orbital shells and spectrum at an unprecedented pace. This occupation by constellations reproduces the possession of orbital space that the Bogotá Declaration was protesting. The paper asks why the logic of occupation was deemed illegitimate when peripheral states made the claim, and legitimate when exercised by the metropolitan powers.
Theoretically, the study is grounded in the theories of indirect-rule and coloniality of governance, arguing that the orbital law administers space as a frontier: a common province for all but whose legal architecture leads to de facto occupation by space-faring powers whilst rendering the subaltern claims inadmissible. The paper bridges an episode from the New International Economic Order era with the contemporary scramble for orbital slots, bringing theories of frontier and indirect rule, developed for territorial governance, into conversation with astropolitics that is characterized by security framing. The study adds to the scholarship by demonstrating how the ITU-Outer Space Treaty’s legal architecture becomes a mechanism of dispossession, rather than limitation by turning cooperation into conflict across North-South divide.