Back to the future of ‘biopower’: Foucault’s prescriptions and the regulation of commercial order and discordance in outer space
Oduntan, Gbenga
Oduntan, Gbenga
Publication Date
2025
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2024
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Abstract
This article applies Foucault’s ideas on Power –specifically biopower as a tool to explain sovereignty, jurisdiction and control over persons in outer space. This approach will hopefully illuminate the general nature and essence of ‘statist’ regulation of outer space activities. We believe that Foulcaut’s analysis of biopower -a tool of critical law scholarship can help to forensically explain the governing dynamics of the jurisdiction ratione personae exercised by states in outer space under the modern Westphalian model of sovereignty. The approach will also aid in prescribing sustainable and progressive policy directions for national regulatory agencies in space. Foucauldian approaches would help reveal both the considerable strengths and of course, the limitations and perhaps inequities of national regulation in space. This exercise will also hopefully indicate quite clearly why networks of international agencies and private corporations ought not be able to displace core aspects of statist manifestation of regulatory power in outer space. The article attempts to free jurisdiction from its semantic legalese in space law and make it encompass philosophy, sociology and jurisprudential influences while at the same time restricting the exploitative purposes to which both jurisdiction and biopower can be pressed in outer space.
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Oduntan G (2025) Back to the future of ‘biopower’: Foucault’s prescriptions and the regulation of commercial order and discordance in outer space. Journal of Space Law. Accepted for Publication.
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