Japan’s Grand Strategy in the International Relations of Space

Japan has historically been attuned to working through opportunities and threats as world orders shift; the case of the new space race layers in a new way to assess Japan’s independent visions and trajectories in a world returned to great power competition. In a novel approach, Saadia Pekkanen adapts the thinking on grand strategy – meaning the logic driving the diverse means by which a state produces prosperity and security for national ends – to the case of space and Japan. She uses that logic to illuminate Japan’s purposeful geoeconomic and geopolitical statecraft in the dynamics of the international relations of space. Given its deeply developmental and historically realist orientation, the Japanese state is engaged in proactive positioning on all fronts in the space domain– economic, military, diplomatic.

 

 

Saadia M. Pekkanen is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Professor of International Studies, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is founding director of the Program on Strategy, Policy, and Diplomacy Research (SPDR) at The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Founding Director of the Space Law, Data, and Policy Program (SPACE LDP) at the School of Law.  She works at the intersection of international relations and international law, specializing in the commercial, legal, and security policies shaping outer space affairs. Her regional expertise is in the foreign affairs of Japan and Asia, engaging broader themes of states, industrial policy, strategy and grand strategy, alliances, and governance in the world order.  She has published 8 books, as well as articles in venues such as American Journal of International Law Unbound, International Studies Quarterly, and International Security. She is most recently co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Space Security (2024). She is a member of the International Institute of Space Law (IISL) and a lifetime member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR).

 

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.