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'Dark Skies' provides a comprehensive and balanced assessment of the space enterprise, past, present and future. It demolishes widely-held optimistic assumptions about the desirability of many major space activities, actual and prospective. Most consequentially, the hiding-in-plain-sight use of outer space as a corridor for long-range bombardment has increased the probability of catastrophic nuclear war. Contrary to the widespread claim that sustainable colonies on other celestial bodies are necessary for human survival from large-scale disasters on Earth, this work shows that colonization itself poses many severe threats and should be avoided. Instead an Earth-oriented space program should be pursued.

Realism, the dominant theory of international relations, particularly regarding security, seems compelling in part because of its claim to embody so much of Western political thought from the ancient Greeks to the present. Its main challenger, liberalism, looks to Kant and nineteenth-century economists. Despite their many insights, neither realism nor liberalism gives us adequate tools to grapple with security globalization, the liberal ascent, and the American role in their development. In reality, both realism and liberalism and their main insights were largely invented by republicans writing about republics. The main ideas of realism and liberalism are but fragments of republican security theory, whose primary claim is that security entails the simultaneous avoidance of the extremes of anarchy and hierarchy, and that the size of the space within which this is necessary has expanded due to technological change. In Daniel Deudney's reading, there is one main security tradition and its fragmentary descendants. This theory began in classical antiquity, and its pivotal early modern and Enlightenment culmination was the founding of the United States. Moving into the industrial and nuclear eras, this line of thinking becomes the basis for the claim that mutually restraining world government is now necessary for security and that political liberty cannot survive without new types of global unions. Unique in scope, depth, and timeliness, Bounding Power offers an international political theory for our fractious and perilous global village.

Anarchy and the balance of power are the two core ideas in Waltz's neorealism, and he explicitly draws them from early modern political theory, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau. Unfortunately, Waltz leaves behind a key variable in these early modern state-of-nature arguments: violence interdependence — the capacity of actors to harm one another (independent of distribution of power). This difference between the extreme insecurity of the state of nature and the tractable insecurity of the state of war derives from different degrees of violence interdependence. The variable is implicit but powerful in Hobbes, and explicit in Rousseau's analysis of topographic fragmentation as a foundation for the European state system. As the effects of the industrial revolution made themselves felt, many theorists (the global geopoliticans, Carr and many liberals) continued to employ the variable Waltz dropped, and they generally argued that Europe had shifted from a state-of-war to a state-of-nature anarchy, thus posing the choice of catastrophe or integration. Herz and Morgenthau continue this argument in the nuclear era, reaching very different conclusions than Waltz. Similarly, the balance of power was conceived by early modern republican theorists as the counter to hierarchy, and this was transposed to the 'system level' via the device of referring to Europe as a whole as a 'republic' that was in part 'by nature'. Other important republican power restraints (notably division, mixture and union) were dropped by Waltz but are developed by liberal globalist security theory.

Reflecting American and allied ascent, Liberal IR theorists have revived earlier theorists, notably Kant and democratic peace, constructing neoclassical liberalism to challenge Realism. Republican security theory (RST) begins in antiquity and reaches a conceptual watershed in the Enlightenment, not in Kant, but in Publius = Federalist. Pessimistic, RST assumed republics were small and expansion would fatally deform, a conclusion derived from Roman history. In a pivotal advance, Publius advanced federal union, suggesting the federal-republican security hypothesis — federal union enables republican viability in competitive interstate systems. Kant does not address the logically and historically prior question of how democracies come to populate competitive state systems sufficiently to make pacific unions. The historical record of the global industrial state system suggests federal-republican security is more important than democratic peace.

At the zenith of British power at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a widespread recognition that Britain's position in the emerging global industrial inter-state system was increasingly precarious and that widespread adjustments would be needed. One solution, the 'imperial federalism' of Seeley and Mackinder, proposed the political integration of the scattered British settler colonies into a 'Greater Britain'. Alternatively, Wells predicted that Britain would become integated into an Anglo-American 'greater synthesis', and that Europe would be unified on 'Swiss confederal' rather than German authoritarian lines. These proposals and prophesies were based upon interpretations of the changing material context composed of technology interacting with geography, and were seriously flawed. Extensive debates on these schemes indicate that the range of grand strategic choice was broader than that conceptualized by contemporary realism. The failure of British national integration due to geographic factors and the endurance of the Anglo-American special relationship casts the roles of the nation-state and the Western liberal order in a new perspective.

At the zenith of GB power at the beginning of the 20th century there was a widespread recognition that GB's position in the emerging global industrial interstate system was increasingly precarious & that widespread adjustments would be needed. One solution, the "imperial federalism" of Seeley & Mackinder, proposed the political integration of the scattered British settler colonies into a "Greater Britain." Alternatively, Wells predicted that GB would become integrated into an Anglo-American "greater synthesis," & that Europe would be unified on "Swiss confederal" rather than German authoritarian lines. These proposals & prophesies were based upon interpretations of the changing material context composed of technology interacting with geography, & were seriously flawed. Extensive debates on these schemes indicate that the range of grand strategic choice was broader than that conceptualized by contemporary realism. The failure of GB national integration due to geographic factors & the endurance of the Anglo-American special relationship casts the roles of the nation-state & the Western liberal order in a new perspective. Adapted from the source document.

Despite its previous centrality in Western political science, materialist arguments in contemporary theories of security politics are neglected and attenuated due to several political and intellectual developments. The extensive geopolitical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was theoretically unsophisticated, deterministic and reductionist, but it was, along with classical Marxism, a branch of a broader attempt to historicize earlier materialist arguments in response to the industrial and Darwinian revolutions. In order to reformulate geopolitics as a more conceptually robust and sophisticated theory, I employ a generalized version of the apparatus of Marxian historical (production) materialism to construct geopolitics as historical security materialism. In this model, the forces of destruction, constituted by the interaction of geography and technology, determine the security functionality of different modes of protection. Two competing modes of protection, the real-state and the federal-republican, distilled from realist and republican (proto-liberal) security practices, entail differing forms of arms control and patterns of institution-building ( asymmetrical binding vs co-binding), and in turn generate differing political structures (anarchy and hierarchy vs republics and states-unions). The security viability of these modes and their attendant structures is hypothesized to vary across three different sets of forces of destruction (early-modern, global-industrial and planetary-nuclear). Simple security, the absence of violence applied to bodies, can result either from the presence of a violence-poor material context, or the presence of political restraints on violence. Real-state practices and structures are security functional in material contexts characterized by low violence volume and velocity and dysfunctional in material contexts of high violence volume and velocity, while the converse is true for federal-republican practices and structures. The role of ancillary concepts of contradiction, reification and idealism is suggested and an agenda for further conceptual work and empirical research is outlined.