Abstrakt
Space security is a growing topic of policy makers' discussions and a sub-discipline of security studies in general. It usually stresses space security as a national security concern.
However, as some political scientists showed us, the more we focus on national interests, the more we see them in contrast to the interests of other nations rather than as interests of mankind. Space has been since 1967 understood as "common interest of all mankind in the progress of the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes." In this perspective, discussions and policy adoptions related to space security in terms of national security will only deepen undesirable concerns rather than to fade them out.
I argue that space security policy makers should rather focus on topics such as planetary defense from asteroids and comets (PD) or coronal mass ejections (CME) that can build bridges of understanding and cooperation between nations through development of a cooperative normative security regimes as we see them in other global security issues. In practical terms, cooperation can be achieved through discussing mentioned common threats and development of shared infrastructure to face them.
Such an approach will facilitate general mankind interests in space: its settlement and deep exploration. Thus, security does not need to be perceived as a negative concept but rather the one that enables mankind cooperation, prosperity and flourishing.
The presentation will consist of following sections: overall perception of PD and CMEs as topics facilitating mankind interests in space, the theory supporting the argument and the proposed approach of its application to practical policy.