Space Privateers or Space Pirates? Armed Conflict, Outer Space, and the Attribution of Non-State Activities
by
Frans von der Dunk
| Jul 26, 2024
Famously, George Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France at the end of the First World War, quipped that “generals always prepare to fight the last war, especially if they won it.” Such flaws of perspicacity, of course, are not limited to generals. After all, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr once mused, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
No wonder then that, when back in 1945 the Charter of the United Nations was concluded, it mainly focused on efforts to prevent a Third World War from arising along the lines of the Second. Most specifically, the massive armed attacks against other sovereign States and their territories that had initiated the war triggered the baseline prohibition of Article 2(4) of the Charter. The UN Charter quickly came to represent the core of globally applicable international law on using or threatening the use of armed force in inter-State relations.
Since then, however, two major developments occurred in the geopolitical context that were not addressed in any detail by the Charter: first, the fundamental involvement of non-State actors in conflict situations; and second, the importance of outer space in armed conflicts. More recently, moreover, these developments have started to become intertwined, giving rise to questions about their legal parameters and ramifications. For example, are crucial contributions from private operators to an armed conflict involving outer space legally attributed to a belligerent or not? Should they be considered space privateers, somehow licensed by States to undertake their attacks, or space pirates, legally unable to hide behind a State’s broad back?
https://lieber.westpoint.edu/space-privateers-pirates-outer-space-attribution-non-state-activities/
