Same orbits, different rocket dreams? China, India, and the case for global space security studies

Abstract

This article puts forward the case for a global space security studies using China and India as an entry point. Recent trends, including the militarization and commercialization of outer space, growing concerns over orbital debris, and the expanding number of state and non-state actors engaged in space activities, have renewed scholarly and policy debates over the nature and scope of contemporary space security. However, although the participation of new actors, particularly from the Global South, has introduced greater diversity and plurality in understandings of what constitutes space security, prevailing analyses remain largely couched in Eurocentrism. This results in reifying a universal understanding of space security rooted in Western strategic cultures, experience, and production of knowledge, which often distorts or obscures the different meanings, referent objects, and drivers of security policy in non-Western contexts. Using the cases of China and India, this article shows the ways in which their understandings and practices of space security are hybrid, influenced by an amalgam of domestic and international factors. This requires going beyond looking at how China and India’s approaches to space security resemble the Eurocentric concept of space security, which offers an incomplete and distorting view. It also entails considering how their concept of space security is defined by differences that are glossed over by Eurocentric assumptions. In so doing, this article illustrates the need for a global space security studies: a potential research agenda that takes seriously the limitations of universal conceptions of space security, while recognizing the distinct logics through which space security is constructed and practiced in different parts of the world.