This book explores the privatization of space and its global impact on the future of commerce, peace and conflict. As space becomes more congested, contested, and competitive in the government and the private arenas, the talk around space research moves past NASA’s monopoly on academic and cultural imaginations to discuss how Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is making space "cool" again. This volume addresses the new rhetoric of space race and weaponization, with a focus on how the costs of potential conflict in space would discourage open conflict and enable global cooperation. It highlights the increasing dependence of the global economy on space research, its democratization, plunging costs of access, and growing economic potential of space-based assets. Thoughtful, nuanced, well-documented, this book is a must read for scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, space studies, political studies, sociology, environmental studies, and political economy. It will also be of much interest to policymakers, bureaucrats, think tanks, as well as the interested general reader looking for fresh perspectives on the future of space.

Privatizing Peace: From Conflict to Security pinpoints the weaknesses in the numerous peacekeeping missions of recent decades, as well as the blind spots in the thinking that guided them. Even more significantly, they clearly demonstrate the ways in which well-meaning stabilization and reconstruction programs fail to accommodate the economic and social imperatives of war-torn societies. But this visionary work is not merely an indictment of First World myopia in the face of Third World devastation. The authors offer cogent, well-thought-out recommendations, firmly grounded in current reality, with a powerful determination to avoid the repetition of past mistakes. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

In this timely work, the author analyzes the use of private military firms and international interventions of the military. Outsourcing to the private sector takes missions away from the military, but the shift towards international intervention adds new, wider functions to the traditional role of defence. If these two trends continue at the present pace, important security functions will be out of control of parliaments, national governments and international authorities. The state monopoly of violence - an achievement of civilization - is at stake.

With inevitable major economic and political transformations ahead, NGOs need to acknowledge and manage their policy dilemmas so that they can anticipate the many inevitable problems that consistently arise in attempting to avoid the return of war by building peace over the medium to long-term

Rather, I use this overview as the basis for my contention that the privatizing peace literatures, while raising a series of pertinent concerns regarding the em/deployment of PMFs, miss a significant opportunity to begin to question and contest the legitimacy of UN peacekeeping as an international practice.2. [...] By this I mean to say, that the proposal to em/deploy PMFs on and for UN peace operations represents a significant challenge to notions of state or public-sector delivered and guaranteed security and thus the emergence of this proposal can be seen as a pertinent opportunity to pursue an interrogation of UN peace operations more generally. [...] Moreover, as the proposal to contract PMFs to conduct UN peace operations signals the increasing, though not unexpected, incursion of the private (for profit) sector into the deliverance of 'public security', it is imperative that the privatizing peace literatures better understand and address the problematic intersections of problem-solving methodologies, (neo)colonialism, militarization, and neo [...] Similarly, "Arms procurement and brokering of small arms and light weapons (SALW) are integral aspects of the activities of mercenaries, private military companies and private security companies" and thus the intervention of PMFs can result in the further channeling or trafficking of arms into conflict zones (Makki et al. [...] Likewise, exclusive focus on the pros and cons raised by and in the privatizing peace literatures comes at the expense of an analysis of the problematic elisions and obfuscations that the privatizing peace literatures can be seen to make.

With inevitable major economic and political transformations ahead, NGOs need to acknowledge and manage their policy dilemmas so that they can anticipate the many inevitable problems that consistently arise in attempting to avoid the return of war by building peace over the medium to long-term