The Geopolitics of Space - Global Space Governance at a Crossroads

The Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), in collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo, has launched a series of three workshops titled “The Geo-Finance of Space” with the goal of investigating how the space race is impacting geopolitics, the world economy and the international legal regime. The third event of the series will focus on space regulation.

Since the launch of the first satellites and the creation of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (1958), space has been a priority in the global governance agenda. To frame the legal regime for the management of space beyond the aerial zone, several treaties, pacts, secondary legislation, and soft laws have been developed. Despite the existing efforts, important grey areas of space regulation exist. In the next future, global actors are likely to increasingly compete over space regulations, such as the issue of utilisation and appropriation of resources in space and the codification of rules of the road and responsible behaviours in orbit.

At the workshop, the paper “The regulation of outer space activities” by Giulia Pavesi (Fellow in International Law of the Research Foundation – Flanders, Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies) will be presented and discussed.