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“The Province of all Humankind” – A Feminist Analysis of Space Law
Abstract
This chapter argues that greater diversity is needed in the space sector, and this will only be achieved when women feel they are truly part of the structures and institutions that govern space. International space law today contains many powerful remnants of the Cold War era, including gender-specific language in the OST which states that space shall be “the province of all mankind”. While we cannot change the terms of the treaty, we can change the way language is used today within the space governance power structures and in future legal instruments. Some may argue that this is not necessary, since “mankind” is intended to include women, however a feminist legal analysis reveals the power dynamics in processes of law-making, interpretation and application which maintain a status quo. In space law and governance, that status quo includes geopolitical dominance by a small group of elite countries, and underrepresentation of women at all levels of decision-making. In the space sector as a whole, the status quo is also a persistent lack of diversity, which not only limits design decisions, but can negatively impact our future in space. If we seek to build new human societies in space, on the Moon, and eventually on Mars, this requires reproductive health and the full participation of all members of these new societies. We cannot achieve this unless we radically shift the assumption of male biology and the male experience as the norm, and unless we move away from elite decision-makers forming laws and governance structures to their own benefit. This chapter undertakes to learn from achievements of feminist legal activism in domestic laws, and to apply this to the process of space law-making, interpretation and application. The use of language in the law is of paramount importance, and so a feminist outcome would be to actively re-interpret the OST and ensure that space becomes the “province of all humankind”.
This volume aims to incubate, illuminate, and illustrate a more diverse and inclusive conservation about space exploration, at a time when Western, free-market capitalist values are dominant in spaceflight culture (and in human societies more generally). What would space exploration be like if we prioritized—or even simply acknowledged—the perspectives or value systems of individuals who are disabled, or aren’t white, or aren’t male, or aren’t characteristically Western in their values? What can these perspectives teach us all about space exploration and its value (or even its potential for harm) that cannot be easily recognized or appreciated under the NewSpace status quo? The twenty-seven original essays of this volume provide perspectives from a wide range of home countries, backgrounds, and lived experiences, including academics who research space exploration, spaceflight culture, space ethics, and space policy, as well as space artists and authors of award-winning science and speculative fiction. Reclaiming Space offers perspectives on the history and development of spaceflight culture, both within and outside the United States; on the impact of science fiction and space art on how we conceptualize space; on the diverse cultural narratives and responses to space; on the ways space exploration might be leveraged in support of repairing injustices; and on what our responsibilities might be as a spacefaring species in the more distant future.
This article brings into conversation scholarship in law and the social studies of outer space around the question of the “uses” of outer space, the shortcomings of existing legal instruments, and the possibility to reform them to place environmental concerns at their core. Starting from the Outer Space Treaty (OST), and using legal geography and an environmental lens, we highlight the interconnections between de-territorializing outer space, the image of the province of (hu)mankind, and the seemingly consequent egalitarian principle of benefit sharing. By reading this language of the OST against its historical context, we note that these seemingly egalitarian clauses mask the persisting hegemony of older space powers in access to and benefits from outer space. In this context, environmental protection clauses originally proposed by Japan, which were marginalized in the drafting of the OST, remain marginal to many governance mechanisms. Even when we decentre the OST and look at multiple legal and governance frameworks of outer space, from Planetary Protection to the International Telecommunications Union, these different approaches reiterate a utilitarian view of space environments that ties them to their usefulness to exploration and exploitation. These mechanisms, while useful for de-homogenizing outer space, do not go far enough in proposing that environmental protection underpins all principles of space governance. One of the effects of this failure is that more technically able nations keep crowding the orbits with megaconstellations. We propose an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex interrelation between space governance, geopolitics, and concerns about the future of outer space environments. A critical legal geography of outer space provides us with a possibility to examine the role of the law in relation to both geographical imaginaries and historical contexts and advance discussions on the role and responsibilities of humans beyond the planet we inhabit.
The presence of gender provisions in peace agreements affects women’s participation in post-conflict societies as well as the chances that a post-conflict society will move towards gender equality. While there is an overall upward trend in the number of references to women’s rights and gender equality in peace agreements, gender-sensitive agreements are not a given. Why and how are peace agreements with gender provisions adopted? We use statistical analysis to explain why some peace agreements adopt gender provisions while others have no such provisions. Based on an analysis of 98 peace agreements across 55 countries between 2000 and 2016, we find that peace agreements are significantly more likely to have gender provisions when women participate in elite peace processes. Our study also shows that the likelihood of achieving a peace agreement with gender provisions increases when women’s representation in national parliaments increases and when women’s civil society participation is significant.
Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations is a groundbreaking collection that brings together leading scholars in contemporary legal theory. The volume explores, at times contentiously, convergences and departures among a variety of feminist and queer political projects. These explorations - foregrounded by legal issues such as marriage equality, sexual harassment, workers' rights, and privacy - re-draw and re-imagine the alliances and antagonisms constituting feminist and queer theory. The essays cross a spectrum of disciplinary matrixes, including jurisprudence, political philosophy, literary theory, critical race theory, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies. The authors occupy a variety of political positions vis-á-vis questions of identity, rights, the state, cultural normalization, and economic liberalism. The richness and vitality of feminist and queer theory, as well as their relevance to matters central to the law and politics of our time, are on full display in this volume. © Martha Albertson Fineman, Jack E. Jackson and Adam P. Romero 2009. All rights reserved.
Eds), The Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2003). 1 The word "recolonisation" is being inter alia used to indicate first, the reconstitution of the relationship between State and international law so as to undermine the autonomy of third world States and to the dis-advantage of its peoples. Second, the expansion of international property rights which are to be enforced by third world States without possessing the authority to undertake the task of redistribution of incomes and resources. Third, the relocation of sovereign economic powers in international trade and financial institu-tions. Fourth, the inability of third world states to resist the overwhelming ideological and military domi-nance of the first world. 2 See UNDP, Human Development Report (1999). 3 We adopt here the definition of domination offered by Thompson: "We can speak of 'domination' when established relations of power are 'systematically asymmetrical', that is, when particular agents or groups of agents are endowed with power in a durable way which excludes, and to some significant degree remains inaccessible to, other agents or groups of agents, irrespective of the basis upon which such exclusion is car-ried out." See J. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, in The Polity Reader in Social Theory (1994) 133 at 136.
This essay examines the connection between violence and masculinity that leads men to appoint themselves the protectors of racialized communities and that constitutes its own interracial brotherhood linking lawbreakers and law enforcers. Feminists are familiar with the concept of "gender violence," but this term is usually used to denote violence by men against women. Yet exploration of the violence in the criminal justice system begins to reveal the extent to which masculine identity is shaped by relations of repulsion and desire between men. Indeed, this community of violence extends to state actors within the criminal justice system, most notably the police. Disrupting the cycle of gender violence both inside and outside the state is a race issue and a gender issue, as well as a criminal justice issue.
Our use of language embodies attitudes as well as referential meanings. ‘Woman's language’ has as foundation the attitude that women are marginal to the serious concerns of life, which are pre-empted by men. The marginality and powerlessness of women is reflected in both the ways women are expected to speak, and the ways in which women are spoken of. In appropriate women's speech, strong expression of feeling is avoided, expression of uncertainty is favored, and means of expression in regard to subject-matter deemed ‘trivial’ to the ‘real’ world are elaborated. Speech about women implies an object, whose sexual nature requires euphemism, and whose social roles are derivative and dependent in relation to men. The personal identity of women thus is linguistically submerged; the language works against treatment of women, as serious persons with individual views.
These aspects of English are explored with regard to lexicon (color terms, particles, evaluative adjectives), and syntax (tag-questions, and related aspects of intonation in answers to requests, and of requests and orders), as concerns speech by women. Speech about women is analyzed with regard to lady : woman, master : mistress, widow : widower , and Mr : Mrs., Miss , with notice of differential use of role terms not explicitly marked for sex (e.g. professional ) as well.
Some suggestions and conclusions are offered for those working in the women's liberation movement and other kinds of social reform; second language teaching; and theoretical linguistics. Relevant generalizations in linguistics require study of social mores as well as of purely linguistic data.
In this article we explore the relationship between TWAIL scholarship and the universality of international law. In particular, we offer an account of this relation as the outcome of what we describe as TWAIL’s characteristic double engagement with the attitudes of both reform and revolution vis-à-vis international law and scholarship. In being thoroughly critical of the cornerstones of the established order, and yet engaged with the practice and operation of international law at the same time, TWAIL scholars have intimated in their search for justice, an idea of universality capable of accepting international law as an agonic project. To further its political engagement with the universal promise of international law, we suggest an explicit methodological turn for TWAIL scholarship that is attentive to international law as a material project. By paying attention to the daily operation of international law at the mundane, quotidian and material plane, we suggest that TWAIL can sharpen its analytical potential and generate at the same time, a ‘praxis of universality’. Such a praxis would be capable of troubling the constitution of places and subjects in the name of the international, whilst heightening our sensitivity to the numerous forms of resistance that are already at play as a particular normative project is being institutionalised and administered across the world.
We can only speak to these critical events ... as they unfold before our own eyes, from our own unhappy situatedness; the Clio's couch, the disengagement that only distance may bring, is not for us the gift of time. We have to struggle, as best we can, to make sense of current developments, amidst ever menacing forms of infliction of traumatic human suffering. This struggle is necessary, especially in an emergent global milieu rife with what early Habermas was to name as "systematically distorted communication."
Over the past decades international affairs have been increasingly legalized. International law has dramatically expanded into new fields and taken on new challenges. Despite this development, there has been little in-depth scholarship on what impact these changes have had on the field of international legal theory, how it is taught, and where it is going. This volume investigates the major developments in the field and explores the core assumptions and concepts, analytical tools, and key challenges associated with different approaches. An outstanding team of legal academics provides an accessible overview of competing theoretical movements, and a more in-depth understanding of the strengths, preoccupations, insights, and limits of those schools of thought. The contributions provide an authoritative account of current thinking about the theoretical foundations of contemporary international law and will serve as an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners.
Feminist perspectives have informed the development of international law at least since the early 20th century, when women’s international peace organizations supported the development of international law and international institutions in the hope that they would provide a means to resolve international disputes peacefully. These and other early feminist efforts bore some fruit, notably with provision for greater protections for civilians in the context of armed conflict, the adoption of antitrafficking treaties, and International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions concerned with women’s conditions of employment. However, this engagement with international law was largely uncritical. International law was understood as a hopeful site for feminist engagement; as providing a means for the improvement of women’s lives as well as enabling a permanent peace. By the mid-1980s, more critical feminist approaches were emerging as it was becoming clear that the law was largely impervious to feminist concerns, with women’s issues marginalized by specialist institutions and instruments, and women still being treated protectively rather than as full rights-bearing subjects of the law. It is at this point that the following bibliography commences, with the emergence of feminist structural and postcolonial critiques of international law, which examined its normative and institutional structures, finding them deeply committed to masculinist and imperial power and therefore in need of significant reconstruction. Feminist approaches to international law have always fallen under a very broad umbrella, resulting in dynamic engagements with the law and its fraternity, as well as passionate internal critique and self-reflection. Feminism’s basic commitment can be described as the struggle to realize women’s equality, but the reality is that multiple strands of feminism have been used to inform international legal theories and practices, and women’s “equality” is considered by some to be an inadequate aspiration. Postcolonial and critical race feminisms have a particularly significant role to play in a field of law that grew from European as well as patriarchal origins. And more recently, the challenge to fully denaturalize “gender” and treat it as an entirely social category has highlighted the importance of questioning the received male/female duality and examining the new possibilities that more fluid conceptions of gender and sexuality open for analyzing the law’s enduring exclusionary effects. Feminist engagements with international law have fostered a vast and diverse literature—marked by both hopefulness and despair, by creative advocacy as well as deepening critique—which touches on every branch or subdiscipline of international law.
This book examines the competing themes of space competition and cooperation while providing readers with an understanding of the basics of space technology, diplomacy, commerce, science, and military applications. In this way, it offers a primer on space policy from an international perspective. It shows how, since the end of the Cold War, space has become increasingly crowded, with new countries, companies, and even private citizens operating satellites and becoming spacefarers. It argues that the recent expansion of human space activity poses new challenges to existing treaties and other governance tools for space, increasing the likelihood of conflict over a diminishing pool of beneficial locations and resources close to Earth. Drawing on more than twenty years of experience in international space policy debates, the book examines possible avenues for cooperation among the growing pool of space actors. It considers their shared interests in space traffic management, orbital debris control, the division of the radio frequency spectrum and the prevention of military conflict. It concludes with policy recommendations for enhanced international collaboration in space situational awareness, scientific exploration, and restraining harmful military activities.
There is an emerging consensus that women’s participation in peace negotiations contributes to the quality and durability of peace after civil war. However, to date, this proposition has remained empirically untested. Moreover, how women’s participation may contribute to durable peace has not been systematically explored. This article uses a mixed method design to examine this proposition. Our statistical analysis demonstrates a robust correlation between peace agreements signed by female delegates and durable peace. We further find that agreements signed by women show a significantly higher number of peace agreement provisions aimed at political reform, and higher implementation rates for provisions. We argue that linkages between women signatories and women civil society groups explain the observed positive impact of women’s direct participation in peace negotiations. Collaboration and knowledge building among diverse women groups contributes to better content of peace agreements and higher implementation rates of agreement provisions. We substantiate this argument with qualitative case study evidence and demonstrate how collaboration between female delegates and women civil society groups positively impacts peace processes. Our findings support the assumption that women’s participation in peace negotiations increases the durability and the quality of peace.
The Earth's orbital space environment constitutes a finite resource that is being used by an increasing number of States, international intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental entities. The proliferation of space debris, the increasing complexity of space operations, the emergence of large constellations and the increased risks of collision and interference with the operation of space objects are raising concerns about the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. Addressing these developments and risks requires international cooperation. In 2010, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOS) established a working group to address these matters and to propose a set of voluntary, non-binding guidelines for States that represent a compendium of internationally recognized measures for, and commitments to, ensuring the long-term sustainability of outer space activities and, in particular, enhancing the safety of space operations. This paper describes the efforts of this Working Group in the context of other multilateral space security initiatives. The first twelve guidelines, which were agreed in 2016, are briefly discussed, as well as the linkages of this process with the recommendations contained in the report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Transparency and Confidence-Building Measures in Outer Space Activities. The paper ends with some reflections on factors shaping the negotiations of the remaining draft guidelines as the Working Group enters its final round of negotiations in 2018.
This article considers the influence of teachings of publicists on the development of international law. The category of 'teachings of publicists' is not a homogeneous one. The article argues that it can be divided into: entities that have been empowered by States to conclude teachings, such as the International Law Commission; expert groups, such as the Institut de Droit International; and 'ordinary' publicists. The teachings of ordinary publicists are also of different types and include digests, treatises, textbooks, monographs, journal articles, and blog posts. Only by breaking down the category into its various types can the influence of the teaching of publicists on the development of international law be properly gauged. Even then, it can prove rather difficult to pin down the notion of 'influence'. Standard assessments of influence focus on the extent to which teachings are cited by courts and tribunals, in particular by the International Court of Justice. However, that approach privileges the role of courts and tribunals in the development of international law and overlooks the role of other actors. As such, the present article offers a different assessment of influence. It identifies the actors that comprise the community of international lawyers and analyses the various interactions that take place between these actors and the teachings of publicists. It is through this interaction, of which citation is but part, that the influence of the teachings of publicists can properly be determined. Copyright
Third World Approaches to International Law or TWAIL is a useful starting point to assess space governance issues from the perspective of emerging or aspirant space actors and users because it helps to highlight imbalances and asymmetry around the supposed “legal right” to space benefit under Article I(1) of the Outer Space Treaty. However, a new analytical lens focused on Cosmopolitan Approaches to International Law or CAIL is proposed that can deconstruct the existing agenda in light of it obscuring the idea of shared benefits without attributing blame, scepticism or negativity, a charge often placed against TWAIL perspectives. This paper asks what one learns from the space law context that prompts us to reorient the frame of analysis that TWAIL perspective brings to bear and focus on a CAILian perspective. Primarily that a TWAILian approach is too one sided and polarized and that a CAILian approach acknowledges reciprocal responsibilities. It highlights the implications of the approach both for emerging and aspirant as well as established space nations specifically and for global space governance in general.
The concept of sustainable development states that every nation is free to determine how to meet its own needs and accrue its own benefits as long as it does not prejudice the ability of future generations to do the same. This end is challenging in the space domain as the existing emphasis on national concerns obscures the larger issues of international structural inequalities—lack of access, barriers to capacity building and technology absorption—while simultaneously magnifying issues related to market protectionism, which are then disguised as security issues. This article makes the claim that it is possible to correct this distortion while safeguarding the focus on global issues, such as space sustainability. While the concept of space sustainability is understood differently depending on the forum for discussion, it is clear that the dominant understanding coincides with the logic for space cooperation as “Governance for Global Security,” and this focuses more on the needs of the present space actors. Analytical tools designed with the “Cosmopolitan Approaches to International Law” express forms of cooperation that produce reciprocal obligations to enable all participants, both present and aspirant, in space exploration and use.
Space law in any meaningful sense started to develop immediately following the launch of Sputnik-1 in October 1957, and ever since has presented a fascinating new body of (essentially) international law. The human space endeavour started with the two superpowers the Soviet Union and the United States, then increasingly involved other states as well. Firstly this remained confined perhaps to the European and Anglo-Saxon parts of the world (France, the United Kingdom, West-Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia), but then also industrial powers from other parts of the world (Japan, the People’s Republic of China) and finally increasingly also from major developing countries (India, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria) as well as a range of smaller countries across the globe entered the arena. These developments resulted in a continuous need to extend and update relevant areas of the legal regime in order to keep abreast of those developments and ensure the continued accessibility of outer space for peaceful purposes for the benefit of mankind – in spite of all the individual military, strategic and political, and then increasingly also economic and social interests at stake. Today’s concerns regarding, for example, space debris and the long-term sustainability of space activities, and the role of private enterprise in space activities respectively themselves arose from more general geo-political and geo-economic developments, but fundamentally require being addressed by law and regulation, firstly on a global scale. Chapter 1 addresses how the overarching issues of space law arose as a consequence of this background and history of space activities and the major political, military, scientific and economic developments guiding them, taking account of the major milestones in this respect such as the first man in space, the first landing on another celestial body, the first re-usable space vehicle, the first long-term space station operations and the first space tourists.
The development of feminist jurisprudence in recent years has made a rich and fruitful contribution to legal theory. Few areas of domestic law have avoided the scrutiny of feminist writers, who have exposed the gender bias of apparently neutral systems of rules. A central feature of many western theories about law is that the law is an autonomous entity, distinct from the society it regulates. A legal system is regarded as different from a political or economic system, for example, because it operates on the basis of abstract rationality, and is thus universally applicable and capable of achieving neutrality and objectivity. These attributes are held to give the law its special authority. More radical theories have challenged this abstract rationalism, arguing that legal analysis cannot be separated from the political, economic, historical and cultural context in which people live. Some theorists argue that the law functions as a system of beliefs that make social, political and economic inequalities appear natural. Feminist jurisprudence builds on certain aspects of this critical strain in legal thought. It is much more focused and concrete, however, and derives its theoretical force from immediate experience of the role of the legal system in creating and perpetuating the unequal position of women.
Bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma.
I'm very honored to be here with my friends and my peers, my sisters in this movement. I also feel an awful lot of conflict about being here, because it is very hard to think about talking about prostitution in an academic setting. It's really difficult. The assumptions of academia can barely begin to imagine the reality of life for women in prostitution. Academic life is premised on the notion that there is a tomorrow and a next day and a next day; or that someone can come inside from the cold for time to study; or that there is some kind of discourse of ideas and a year of freedom in which you can have disagreements that will not cost you your life. These are premises that those who are students here or who teach here act on every day. They are antithetical to the lives of women who are in prostitution or who have been in prostitution. If you have been in prostitution, you do not have tomorrow in your mind, because tomorrow is a very long time away. You cannot assume that you will live from minute to minute. You cannot and you do not. If you do, then you are stupid, and to be stupid in the world of prostitution is to be hurt, is to be dead. No woman who is prostituted can afford to be that stupid, such that she would actually believe that tomorrow will come. I cannot reconcile these different premises. I can only say that the premises of the prostituted woman are my premises. They are the ones that I act from. They are the ones that my work has been based on all of these years. I cannot accept--because I cannot believe--the premises of the feminism that comes out of the academy: the feminism that says we will hear all these sides year after year, and then, someday, in the future, by some process that we have not yet found, we will decide what is right and what is true. That does not make sense to me. I understand that to many of you it does make sense. I am talking across the biggest cultural divide in my own life. I have been trying to talk across it for twenty years with what I would consider marginal success.
Women have achieved much since the revival of international criminal justice. But much remains to be achieved, both in the number and quality of women judges and in the way that women's concerns are addressed, as the implementation of complementarity shifts humanitarian law from international to national judicial arenas.
This article traces the contemporary origins of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) in the late 1990’s. It argues that since then, TWAIL-ers have not sought to produce a single authoritative voice or text. Instead, they have generated vibrant ongoing debate around questions of colonial history, power, identity and difference, and what these mean for international law. TWAIL scholarship has also considered possibilities for egalitarian change in a broad variety of areas in the fields of public international law and international economic law. In doing so, TWAIL-ers have addressed multiple issues related to society, politics, identity and economic - with an underlying commitment to democratic values and concerns in relations within and between the Third World and developed countries. As a distinctive way of thinking about international law, TWAIL is a historically aware methodology - one that challenges the simplistic visions of an innocent third world and a colonizing and dominating first world. This methodology proceeds from the assumption that is not possible to isolate modern forms of domination such as governmentality, from the continuation of older modes of domination (colonial and precolonial). This article argues that TWAIL has become an expansive, heterogeneous and polycentric dispersed network and field of study. As a field, TWAIL is being continuously re-invented and shaped by new scholars infusing their passion into its central concerns. These scholars are refashioning and contesting what they take as central TWAIL tenets and inventing their own TWAILS. Thus, TWAIL is a discipline in transition, expansion, definition and internal contestation about the varied agendas of its scholars, all at the same time.
Obra que examina la validez del derecho al uso de la fuerza e intervención militar de los estados y el rol de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU) para mantener la paz y la seguridad internacional. Se presentan casos de análisis como los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre en Estados Unidos y la invasión a Irak en el 2003.
Friday’s all-woman spacewalk: The basics
- B Dunbar
Conceptualizing change and equality in the ‘third World’Contexts. Women in the Third World: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Issues
- S Feldman
Female cosmonaut bats back questions about hair and parenting
- A France-Presse
Olympe de Gouges, the radical French feminist who was murdered twice
- R Bar
Nasa cancels all-female spacewalk, citing lack of spacesuit in right size
- M Cantor
Brownlie’s principles of public international law
- J Crawford
Asking the law question
- M Davies
How to avoid sexist language in space - Dr Space Junk wields the red pen
- A Gorman