The Oxford Handbook of Space Security

Abstract

Abstract The Oxford Handbook on Space Security focuses on the interaction between space technology and international and national security processes. This volume theorizes the development and governance of space security and analyzes the specific pressure points currently challenging that regime. Space security is a complex assemblage of societal risks and benefits that result from space-based capabilities and is currently in a period of transformation as innovative processes are rapidly changing the underlying assumptions about stability in the space domain. This volume takes an analytically eclectic approach to assess space security from an international relations (IR) theory perspective. It builds an understanding of space security, infused with the theory and practice of IR and advances analysis of key states and regions as well as specific capabilities. It draws on the expertise of a set of scholars who bring a range of analytical and theoretical perspectives to bear on the empirical changes affecting space security. Space security is currently in a period of great transition as new technologies are emerging and states openly pursue counterspace capabilities. This volume brings together scholarship from a group of leading experts that helps to explain how these contemporary changes will affect future security in, from, and through space.