(Page 4 of 26) - Taking Sovereignty Out of This World: Space Weaponization and the Production of Late-Modern Political Subjects authored by Duvall, Raymond. and Havercroft, Jonathan.

very meaning of unit and unity, power and power relations, sovereignty and
independence” (1957: 474). Succinctly put, and in somewhat tempered terms, “the
meaning and function of the basic protective unit, the ‘sovereign’ nation-state itself, have
become doubtful” (1957: 473).

As Deudney (1995) points out, this initially influential argument has mostly fallen out of
favor with the passage of time, as the horrific potential of nuclear war has receded in
political imaginaries, and as a different strand of realist thought emphasizing the
stabilizing effect of nuclear deterrence has become widely accepted. According to the
latter view, which Deudney labels “deterrence statism,” nuclear war can be, and is,
deterred by the assurance of mutual destruction. This deterrent effect serves to re-
inscribe the territorial integrity of sovereign state authority. But as Deudney argues

The current near consensus among international relations theorists that the
state has weathered the nuclear revolution could turn out to be as far off
the mark as the widely held view, proclaimed by Zbigniew Brzezinski in
1986, that the US-Soviet rivalry was ‘an effectively permanent feature of
world politics.’ In short, the simplest nuclear one world scenario of ‘after
the deluge, the covenant’ retains a residual credibility that forbids us from
ever completely dismissing it (Deudney, 1995: 214).

That “residual credibility,” Deudney believes, should and can be given new theoretical
life if a more complex appreciation of the forms and effects of military technologies is
developed than that provided by the early “nuclear one worldists,” and if a fuller
theorization is offered on the constitution of political societies/political subjects.

We take up that challenge in this paper, extending but appreciably modifying the “nuclear
one worldist” basic insight, by asking how a crucially important, but mostly ignored, set
of developments in technologies of destruction and economies/cartographies of violence
—specifically, efforts to militarize/weaponize outer space—have significant constitutive
effects on sovereignty, and accordingly on the sovereign territorial state as subject of
global political life. Our argument, in simple terms, is that the militarization of space
reconstitutes and alters the social production of political society in three interlocked ways
that are rooted respectively in three distinct forms of putting economies/cartographies of
violence into practice in outer space. The conjoint effect of those three processes of
reconstitution is to substitute the consolidation of an extra-territorial system of rule—
which we refer to as late modern empire—for the competitive sovereignties of the
modern states-system.

To develop that argument, we take four analytical steps. In the first section of the paper,
we examine the constitution of modern sovereignty and the political subjects of which it
is productive. This involves a brief engagement with a number of recent efforts critically
to theorize sovereignty and its challenges/transformations. In the second section, we
review the changing technologies of destruction and economies of violence that are being
introduced/imagined in the current project of militarizing/weaponizing space. We do not
attempt to provide a detailed technological accounting, but instead to describe the broad

In Morgenthau’s words “Any attempt, however ingenious and forward-looking, at assimilating nuclear

power to the purposes and instrumentalities of the nation-state is negated by the enormity of nuclear
destructiveness. We have been trying to normalize, conventionalize, and ‘nationalize’ nuclear power. By
doing so, we have tackled the wrong horn of the nuclear dilemma.” (1964: 35).