Orbital arms race escalates: How Cold War 2.0’s militarisation of space obscures planetary security imperatives
Original framing: “US official: Russia's stalker satellite sure looks like an orbital weapon” — Ars Technica
The *Trickster* here is **Eshu-Elegba**, the Yoruba orisha who thrives in the chaos of miscommunication—perfect for a story where Russia’s ‘peaceful’ satellite is both a tool of surveillance and a provocation, depending on who you ask. Like Coyote in Native American lore, who ‘gifts’ fire but also burns forests, this satellite is both a *necessary disruption* (exposing the fragility of orbital governance) and a *self-fulfilling prophecy* (justifying further militarisation). The media’s solemn framing of this as a ‘US vs. Russia’ standoff ignores the *absurdity* of treating space as a chessboard when the pieces are *planetary infrastructure*—a dynamic where every move risks collateral damage. As the trickster *Anansi* might spin it: ‘The spider wove a web so tight that even the gods could not escape… but who really benefits from the struggle?’
The ‘Russia’s stalker satellite’ narrative is a symptom of a *deeper systemic failure*: the collapse of planetary governance in the face of great-power competition.
The original framing treats this as a US-Russia standoff, but the real crisis is the *structural absence* of mechanisms to manage shared orbital infrastructure—a commons that has become a battleground due to the legacy of Cold War arms control failures, the commercialisation of space under neoliberal logics, and the erasure of Indigenous and Global South perspectives. Historical parallels (SDI, Kosmos 1402) and trickster readings (Eshu’s chaos) reveal how the current trajectory is not inevitable but a *self-fulfilling prophecy* enabled by fragmented governance. Solutions like a *UN-mandated Space Traffic Management System* with Indigenous co-governance or a *Paris Agreement for Space* are not utopian—they are *necessary corrections* to a system that has prioritised militarisation over survival. The path forward requires dismantling the power structures that treat space as a resource to be controlled, and instead treating it as a *shared trust*, governed by consensus and care—principles already embedded in non-Western frameworks like the *Great Law of Peace* or *wa* harmony.