Political Struggle Is Subterranean and Orbital

The beating heart of geopolitical theory and strategy is territorial. Just about any territorial process you can imagine is fed by space technologies and the information they transmit. These rely on hardware on Earth or in space. Hardware is comprised of minerals, metals, and materials wrested from the Earth, transformed by human labor, and shuttled through intricate and transnational supply chains. You could say then that the minerals and information flows are arteries that feed the beating heart of geopolitical theory and practice. But most analyses do not take these into account, and a heart without arteries is just a lump of dead flesh. Similarly, I would argue that attempts at political theory and strategy that do not account for these animating mineral flows are likewise dead, deathly, or dying.

This matters immediately for struggles against authoritarianism, not least in meeting the need for political theorization that is equal to the moment, freed from the torpor of treating the present as an aberration. For better and for worse, what was unthinkable a few years or decades ago has come to constitute the normal. It is a normal of awe-inspiring scientific and social progress and possibility, but also a normal of expanding forms of brutality, precarity, and violence. This insight is not new. Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics dealt with the circulation of values, people, and commodities under neoliberalism, analyzing in different historical moments how people are rendered not only disciplinable but disposable in service of maintaining the circulation of commodities—and, I would add, information. To put it slightly differently, these are supply-chain issues, concerned with the circulation of commodities, and there is seemingly no limit to the physical and ideological demands for their maintenance.

Similarly, struggles to defend and deepen democracy in all its forms coalesce around different manifestations of these issues: sometimes symbolic, sometimes material, sometimes place-based. What may prove helpful in these times is to focus on something concrete, where values and relations shed their immateriality and become something tangible and transformable. Satellites, as one example, epitomize the beautiful and terrible forces marking our present moment because of the divergent interests that inform their development, launch, and use, from scientific cosmopolitanism to for-profit militarism. They vividly illustrate how democratic and antidemocratic visions can be realized through the same technology, an insight that extends through their constitutive supply chains that mobilize the materials essential to turn a blueprint into a functioning technology.

Even after a satellite is launched, its politics remain grounded. Protests in the streets, policy(un)making in offices, and radical changes in the relative freedom of movement of different groups of people all rely on satellite networks for communications, positioning, and intelligence, which embeds them in supply chains that can be traced through transnational labor and trade networks to, eventually, a mine. Neither the technological networks nor the decisions about where and under what conditions to open a mine are neutral matters. Rather, both are active terrains of struggle in which antidemocratic interests have made breathtaking strides. This is manifest in the proliferation of satellites for anti-cosmopolitan ends and the domination of orbital space by a few private firms and their mega-constellations, some consisting of hundreds or even thousands of satellites. All of which have, in specific times and places, favored antidemocratic interests. What hope is there for freedom of movement and communication—that lifeblood of democracy—if the channels and platforms are controlled by these interests?

It is no exaggeration to say that the defining struggles of our time hinge on access to and power within space-based systems. This parallels long-standing political theory centered on land: security of land tenure and sovereignty over a defined space underpin community power. Where a protected right to refuse what is done on one’s land exists, democracy tends to thrive. Dispossession, then, is a loss not only of heritage but also of the legal and institutional vigor meant to guard against such theft.

In the same vein, we can think of the mass dispossession of the right to sovereignty and self-determination with respect to orbital space as another kind of political theft. Not only are we endlessly surrendering data about ourselves and our movements through our interactions with data-harvesting and tracking software built into the satellite-linked apps within digital devices with which the global majority interacts, we are also largely surrendering to the takeover of orbital space and the information and communication networks in it to ever more rapacious and ever less accountable interests, in breach of existing international treaties.

One example of how this manifests itself geopolitically occurred in March 2025, when the United States cut off its military and intelligence support to Ukraine. A private satellite firm had been providing high-resolution real-time satellite imagery to Ukraine, paid for by a US government program. As a private firm, it arguably could have chosen not to comply with the sudden government directive, and chosen instead to continue to provide support while challenging the directive in court. Instead, within 12 hours, it had halted its service to Ukraine, which meant that the country’s defense forces were suddenly “flying blind” for everything from drone strikes to long-range missile detection and urban warning systems. A week later, the US government lifted the restriction but did not restore funding for this imagery. The company, valued at approximately $2 billion, chose to make its imagery available to Ukraine only on a paid basis. This did not change even after the United States and Ukraine signed a minerals agreement in April.

What this situation makes clear is that, even in a time of unprecedented surveillance of the surface of the Earth, and a well-established and decades-old global framework designed to maintain peace to prevent wars of aggression of the supposedly bygone imperial era, states and firms can collude to weaken the self-defense of a sovereign state under attack by an expansionist power. And in this case not even the act of the victim granting preferential access to its territory’s geological endowments led to the restoration of support for satellite services.

Restoring peace, democracy, and human rights on Earth cannot happen without attending to how power is exercised in and through subterranean and orbital spaces. Arguably, leaving these spaces outside of the mainline of liberal democratic concern has left them open as a playground for experiments with authoritarianism, violence, and enclosure. Viewed from a supply-chain perspective, these experiments have also been essential to moving materials and information that constituted the lifeblood of liberal globalization: another insight that is not new. But this means that subterranean and orbital spaces have been political arenas for a long time, and it has been a grave error for democratically minded theorists and strategists to consider them as either too far away or too irrelevant to the terrestrial struggles that bring people into the streets, (un)make policies, or involve attempts to redraw national borders.

Grabbing hold of that fact might make it possible to generate the new political concepts, tactics, and solidarities that are equal to the challenges of the moment.

Julie Klinger is a geographer and an associate professor of sustainable land use, conservation, and environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a guest at the IWM in 2025.