Feminist Astropolitics with Cassandra Steer

As told to kirthi jayakumar

Dr Cassandra Steer is Chair and founder of the Australasian Centre for Space Governance. Globally recognised for her expertise in space governance, space law, and space security, she has published widely on these topics, including the application of the law of armed conflict and use of force in outer space. Her book War and Peace in Outer Space (co-edited with Matthew Hersch) has been cited as very useful for military and government practitioners, and the podcast she hosts, titled Space Matters, has been cited as instructive by senior international arms control diplomats.Dr Steer has consulted on space law and space security issues to the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, the Australian, Canadian and U.S Departments of Defence, the Australian Space Agency and Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. She has taught space law and space security at McGill University, the ANU College of Law, the ANU National Security College and the Australian Defence College.

Cassandra is pictured before a backdrop presenting an artistic rendition of the Soul Nebula. (Photo credits: Cassandra Steer - Profile picture | Kirthi Jayakumar - Astronomical Art)

What drew you to work in space law?

I didn't really grow up with much of an interest in space. My father was into science fiction and encouraged me to read a lot of the traditional science fiction. But it just didn't pique my interest. My undergraduate studies and my law degrees were all in international law, the laws of armed conflict, and international criminal law. I was very interested in how the law can respond to the worst possible expressions of humanity, particularly how we can hold leaders responsible for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity. The law is a bit limited as a tool, but at least it is a tool.

I was doing my PhD at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands in around the 2010s. I had begun my studies before there international criminal law was a formal field of study. By the time I was doing my PhD, there were students graduating with masters and special degrees in international criminal law and international criminal procedure. Given that most international criminal tribunals are in the Hague in the Netherlands, it was a center for a critical mass of experts in the field. It felt saturated to me and I felt like there wasn't a lot of room to contribute anything meaningful. I was looking for something different to do next.

Military lawyers began pointing me to space law. I had never thought about it before. When I started to delve into it, in around 2011-2012, I realized that it was just another domain in which the issues I was interested in were playing out. The geopolitical competition between different states, the rising power of India at the time, the role China and Russia played, and what smaller middle powers were capable of doing, and what commercialization brought into the mix. I was also curious about what the forces of a new economy were doing to what was going on, and the impacts it all had on civilians, because we depend on these technologies every day. I wanted to see how the laws of armed conflict would apply to these space technologies. It really was a new domain to apply the questions that I was interested in. It felt, and still does feel, like there's enough room to contribute meaningfully and to contribute new ideas.

What are some of the gaps you've been able to see in how the law handles spacefaring?

We have to have realistic expectations about what the law can do as a tool. As they say, “as above, so below” - I think that's exactly what we see in spacefaring. It's not only geopolitics playing out in this domain, and the domain itself is not far away. Space is only a hundred kilometers away from us - many of us travel further than that to go on holiday. I'm convinced that we need to think about our near earth environment as just part of our natural environment. It's definitely part of our technological environment. The challenges we're seeing around the world in terms of our impact on our natural environment and the geopolitical shifts that we're seeing in this new multipolar era need attention. The roles that commercial and private entities play in this international order in the 2020s differs from what they did 20, 30, and even 40 years ago.

The challenges in terms of how we govern issues in front of us on Earth are exactly the same in space. How do we govern or regulate climate change or the negative impacts on the climate through massive commercial activities? How do we ensure equal access to resources? Is that something the law can do or not? How do we regulate commercial actors? How do we restrain state activities and those competitions so that they don’t lead to conflict? It's exactly the same in space as it is anywhere, really.

There's only so much that law can do if we're talking about regulating private actors, for example. All private actors in space fall under the domestic law of whatever jurisdiction they registered in. So whenever people say, you know, space is lawless, it's this wild west, I get really frustrated because there is so much law governing space!

What we have in international space law is a series of framework treaties that still are very much fit for purpose to my mind, because they set down the organizing principles and the limits. We have five space law treaties. We have whole bodies of public international law that apply by virtue of Article III  of the Outer Space treaty, which says everything in space must be in accordance with international law. This means all the laws governing armed conflict, the use of force, international environmental law, and human rights apply. By the time we have more people in space, there'll be other kinds of laws – such as labour laws – coming up. Private actors and their space objects fall under the jurisdiction of the country in which they're registered. Then it depends on how those countries regulate such conduct. For instance, the US has layers and layers and layers of regulation and India is developing more legislation.

One thing that was very important in the 1960s when those treaties were negotiated was the concern for a nuclear war and the competition between the Soviets and the US. That's why we have a prohibition on placing nuclear weapons in orbit around space around the Earth, and why we have a prohibition on military bases on the moon or other celestial bodies.

What we don't have is sufficient policy or law around space to debris and how to properly regulate and manage space traffic. There are a lot of different initiatives around the world to tackle that. We don't yet have a sufficient understanding of how to regulate new technologies. That's the same on earth. What do we do about AI, for example? What do we do about robotics? What do we do about these autonomous things that we're going to be dealing with on a daily basis? These things are complex, and to me it's just another domain where those things are playing out before us.

Do you think the space laws we have in place would have been different if they emerged in a different context, perhaps not in a polarized world with the US and USSR at loggerheads?   

There are some scholars who've written some really great stuff about the political drafting history of the space treaties. The fact is that even as these two states gained prominence in the history, there were other countries in the room. There were a number of European countries: France and the UK had already become fairly active in spacefaring. Although it was a bipolar era and a lot of other geopolitics were dominated by that dynamic, we can't erase the fact that it was also a period of decolonization across Asia and the Pacific, Africa, and South America. Although not many of those countries were very active in space, they were paying attention to all that was happening.

They had access to a new domain that was already dominated by the two dominant powers on earth. What does that mean for everyone else? How were they going to ensure that for a start, it didn’t lead to a nuclear war between those two powers, given that it would impact all other states? The US and USSR had tested nuclear weapons and electric magnetic pulses in space. They'd realized that the impacts of both could not be contained, and that these activities could affect everybody's satellites. There's no doubt that the US and USSR were dominant players. But I think we very easily forget who else was actually in the room and did have vested interest and helped to guide that process. And that's part of the reason we have certain specific language in there.

One example is the fact that states are responsible for the activities of non-government entities in space. There was a whole debate about commercial actors under their jurisdiction between the Soviets and the Americans. Some other players managed to tip the balance towards a compromise, to say that making states responsible to authorize and continually supervise space activities would force them to put domestic legislation in place. It forced the hand of states to be the regulator rather than leaving it up to an international community approach.

There were also attempts a bit later to even out the inequality of access to space. For a long time, it was only the most wealthy technologically advanced countries who could have space programs and access space. It took a while for other countries to be able to have a say. By the late 1970s and 1980s, more and more countries and individuals were already the beneficiaries of cable television and advanced telecommunications. Earth observation data came in handy for farmers and for tracking water health. It became clear that not only the countries who could access space, but also those that were benefiting from space had a vested interest in the continual good governance of space. We saw things like the Space Benefits Declaration in 1996, which involved a lot of non-aligned countries drawing on the language of the outer space treaty to ensure that space remained a domain for the benefit of all humankind and not just for those who were dominating the space economy.

We've seen a little bit more of that around space security discussions in recent years where it is middle powers and smaller nations in the Asia Pacific who are starting to really push that agenda because of how dependent we all are. I guess that's still a bit of a gap in terms of how we govern and regulate that so that we are ensuring accessibility to the benefits of those technologies globally. Another piece where there's a bit of a missing gap is the gender side, namely accessibility and equality.

Let’s talk about that more. What does a gender gap in space law result in?

Wherever you have inequalities in a society or greater competition over access to resources, you invariably have gender-based inequalities. We know from other areas like access to digital technologies and the internet, that gender inequalities show up there a lot, as well. The same thing goes for a lot of our internet and telecommunications, which are satellite based today. A lot of local economies depend on banking and payments that go over satellite systems. If we don't have access to that, how is a local economy working, say, in conflict zones? How can we track the ways in which girls and women might be specifically targeted? We need earth observation for that. Bringing in an explicit but integrated gender responsive approach to how we govern these questions is key.

One of the ways you’re addressing this gap is by introducing the WPS Agenda into outer space laws and policies. What does that look like?

I really want to acknowledge support by Cynda Collins Arsenault, who is the founder of the Secure World Foundation, which is an amazing civil society organization that does incredible advocacy and education work globally. She is also passionate about women's role in global security. It was a logical melding for her between those two things. I'm very grateful for her support on trying to drive this agenda forward. Gender issues were almost always on the periphery of all that I had been focusing on – specifically in relation to armed conflict and international criminal law.

I remember reading with just a sense of – I don't know if excitement is the right word – the judgment by Navi Pillay in the 1990s from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she, as a judge, first identified rape and gender-based and sexual violence as acts amounting to genocide, when it is carried out to target the girls and women because of their identity as members of a particular group. I remember thinking at the time that it seemed kind of obvious, but I also realized that until you write it down in a judgment and it becomes law, it only stays in the periphery. Some of the work I had done in Canada between 2015 and 2017 as Executive Director of a really great civil society organization called Women in International Security offered me a great learning curve around international security issues through a gender perspective. In a way, the focus on women and security has always been there – but it was linking it with outer space has emerged in the last several years.

I spent a few years working in Australia and connected with Elise Stephenson, who is an expert in gender politics and Women, Peace, and Security. She had just begun taking an interest in space. We brought our expertise together and complement each other well in these areas of work. The Women Peace and Security agenda has two key pillars – one is increasing women’s participation in the military, civilian police forces, and in peacekeeping and peace negotiations, and the other is identifying ways to ensure that we are protecting women and girls’ rights during times of armed conflict and after.  Elise focuses on women’s participation, and does a lot of evidence-based research, both qualitative and quantitative. I’ve been focusing on the application of space technologies and operations – especially military ones – and how they are going to apply a gender-responsive lens, especially while seeking to interfere with or attack an adversary space system, a cyber-attack, or jam a signal or other non-physical interferences, all of which are happening, by the way, every single day. We need to take into account the gendered impacts of these actions. Who is going to be impacted by loss of service from that satellite, especially if it's a dual use one? If you as a military operator are targeting or interfering with an adversary’s commercial satellite as a legitimate military objective, that's providing both military and civilian services, you have to take into account under the laws of armed conflict.

One principle in the laws of armed conflict, namely the proportionality principle, requires military actors to weigh the anticipated military advantage against the expected collateral damage. Most acts that target dual-use satellites disproportionately impact girls and women, because it's the only way they have access to education, money, and even communications that keep them safe. If you are a country going into a conflict, either as a party to the conflict or in a peacekeeping capacity, you want to make sure that you are using your own space capabilities with a gender responsive lens. How are you ensuring that you can protect women and girls who may be displaced or put into camps? If there's gender violence, how can you make sure there's earth observation data as evidence so that you can task your forces on the ground? How can you make sure that there is access to communications? The technology side and the human participation side need to be appropriately resourced to account for all their gendered impacts.

How can we expand the definition of security to acknowledge and incorporate gendered experiences in relation to spacefaring?

That can be a tricky one to translate. I have failed, sometimes, in doing so. The UN, in 2022, set up an Open-Ended Working Group on Reducing Space Threats by establishing rules, norms, and principles. That was a huge game changer. It took us away from what had been the subject of a deadlock for a couple of decades around space arms control. That deadlock has focused on questions like: “Can we define a weapon or not?” “Do we need a treaty or not?” There's been a real political divide, and a total deadlock. There was a shift with the setting up of this Open-Ended Working Group. The UK was a key player that made a difference – but it also took countries like Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and even South Korea, so a lot of actors from the Asia Pacific, to help drive that. In one of the early sessions, we held a side event  to talk about why we needed a gender responsive lens on space security. Someone asked me what difference it made to account for gender while speaking about a new norm on the prohibition of using direct descent, anti-satellite missiles that blow up a satellite in space and create debris. I struggled to answer that question because it may be that there are some questions where the gender lens doesn't make a difference directly. However, the impacts and risks involving that debris, say, of hitting other satellites that women and girls depend on for their communications, or banking, might actually have disproportionate gendered effects in various countries. It is very hard to predict and measure.

I also did say that states are patriarchal institutions – and these discussions are taking place among states. I remember thinking that it is probably not the most helpful response to a diplomat who just wants to know how we get to these norms and how to apply a gender lens. It can be a hard thing to answer because you have to go through several steps of explanation to get there. I think this is where participation matters. Unless you have women experts in the room, as diplomats, as legal experts, as operational and technical experts, you're going to miss out on where a gender lens does matter when you're talking about space operations and the users and uses of space technologies. We’ve learned this from the WPS Agenda – when you have more women participating at multiple levels, it does lead to better outcomes.   

And yet, very often, when we talk about bringing more women into the place, the system has a clever little cop out of going for the low hanging fruit. They add women and stir up the mix, and that doesn’t necessarily do the feminist thing – we see the patriarchal bargain operate. Going forward, what might be a healthy way to bring in a feminist lens into spacefaring conversations so these spaces are meaningfully inclusive?  

I wish I had an easy answer to that! I think your question is very pertinent, particularly right now, as we see the explicit erasure of the words “gender” and “women” in the US from any policy and in their military. That’s actually a step back from add-women-and-stir, and is actually going in the opposite direction. How do we have a healthy approach to why this matters? I don't think it's enough just to say that women and girls matter.

In one of the first pieces I wrote about this, I talked about why we need a feminist or gender lens in space generally. It was an attempt at a feminist analysis of space law, called the “Province of All Humankind.” The Outer Space Treaty mentions the “province of mankind.” I strove to point out that it is not the province of all mankind, but is rather the province of a few wealthy elite nations and companies, and a heavily male dominated technology domain. We are not thinking about the impacts of not having women in careers in these fields, as well as the impacts of women and girls not having access to these technologies. My partner told me to write the piece for someone like him – a person who is generally convinced of a feminist agenda, but still needs it laid out as to why it matters to have more women involved – and for those who are less convinced of a feminist agenda.

That gave me perspective. I was thinking about sexual and reproductive health rights for women going out into space – but I stopped in my tracks because I realized that framing made women sound like baby-making machines for future colonies. I wanted to think about ways to explain this to someone who isn’t already convinced that it matters to have equal access and that there are disproportionate impacts based on gender. I landed with a piece that's probably a bit more liberal feminist than where I would place myself on the spectrum, because I was really just trying to say that if we have a limited type of people trying to solve a problem, we can have a limited type of results and proposed solutions. I wanted to drive home the point that if we have homogenous thinking about homogenous groups, we come up with group think. If we have all white men from an elite economic and educational background designing spacefaring technologies, they will come up with a design principle that works to some extent – but doesn’t work for everyone and in challenging environments.

We see this unfold right now – the development of technology, as well as the political and economic realities of the world. We need to have different minds engaged to solve these wicked problems of the 21st Century – we cannot do this with a single type of approach. All of humanity can benefit if we bring in more representative voices to tackle these problems.

We know that Indigenous communities have also had spacefaring technologies. What we're seeing, though, is that most engagements with space technologies tend to emphasize a certain kind of colonial technology as the acceptable form, to the detrimental exclusion of others. How might we decolonize spacefaring? 

Oh, I love this question so much. There are many scholars out there who have far more expertise in decolonization work. I'm not Indigenous myself, and I'm listening to the voices of the actual knowledge holders. One beautiful example is the Boomerang, which Aboriginal Australians developed tens and tens of thousands of years ago. It can be a hunting tool and even a tracking tool. They developed it in such a way that if you throw it correctly, it'll return to you. With different angles and edges, it can do different things. Some of them are not designed to return. That is aerospace technology that is tens of thousands of years old. I think learning and adapting design principles like that rather than our 1950s rocket, which is what we all have in mind when we think of what a space vehicle must look like, is an example of what we can do. Such acts will acknowledge the fact that many, many Indigenous communities, particularly those that have these centuries or millennia old connections and knowledge bases with their environment, are the experts when it comes to maintaining a difficult environment for long-term sustainability and intergenerational equity. That's what they had to do for survival, and that's how they lived.

Many Indigenous communities have a far more harmonious relationship with their natural environment than the western capitalist model does. I think that's undeniable. If we want to figure out how we do that for space, we should be listening to the people who've been doing it for much, much longer.

I think also we want to think about how a space system is made – it is made up not only of what actually exists in space, a satellite, or a spacecraft or robotics, but is also made up of a ground station, which is where it's operated from, where the communications or data comes back down. Space systems also comprise of the link between space and ground. Then there's the fourth segment: The people, the humans who operate and use space. I'm working on a book at the moment where I am really trying to advance this idea that people should be at the core of any space design, whether that is human space flight or robotics, or how we're getting our internet from space. We need to expand our cognitive identities to include our near earth space environment.

We're already in space and Aboriginal Australians will tell you that they’ve walked in and been in space. Their dream time tells them that they've traveled in space, which may have a range of different meanings and interpretations. They are fully aware that the celestial sky they see at night is an exact mirror of earth and what's happening on it. What we're doing on earth, mirrors what is happening in space. As above, so below. We need to think about where we can better engage Indigenous communities on the ground infrastructure and bring them in as designers and operators and centre them as users of space.

A lot of Indigenous communities depend on earth observation for monitoring the health of water and for assisting with animal population when they hunt. In the Arctic regions, they use it for tracking how ice melts. They know when they can traverse various areas. Spacefaring is key to their traditional ways of living. They integrate these 21st century technologies with their centuries or millennia old technologies and knowledge. How can we engage better? How can we ensure that there are better pathways for Indigenous peoples to sustain their practices? What might it look like to share economic benefits and practice co-governance on the ground infrastructure?

There are launch sites being developed all over Australia at the moment, which are all on Indigenous country. There are controversial ones in Indonesia where Elon Musk's company SpaceX wants to build a site on an island that belongs to Indonesia, but various Indigenous groups are being displaced just to be able to achieve this. How can we rather have a co-governance, co-design mechanism for a launch site if it happens to be a great location for a launch? We may not have to say an absolute no – we must make sure that it's designed in such a way that the local people are benefiting and the environment is benefiting from these actions.