Security cooperation in space and international relations theory

Abstract

This chapter resorts to international relations theory to explain various patterns of security cooperation in space. There have been several attempts for security cooperation but the success was limited. While neorealism explains this lack of cooperation with the difficulties to achieve balanced gains, for neoinstitutionalism, the centralhurdle is the establishment of effective rules and mechanisms to verify the compliance of states.For a constructivist/liberal account, the main problem lies in the dominant beliefs about the value of unilateral space policies.Taken together these three theoretical perspectives provide a comprehensive account of security cooperation in space.