Celestial Ambitions: Space Race and Capitalism in the 21st Century
The Institute of International Management and Entrepreneurship hosts a monthly speaker series, featuring experts from leading institutions across the UK and around the world. Each session explores a diverse range of timely and critical topics, exploring how global economic, social, and institutional forces shape entrepreneurial practices and organisational dynamics across different cultural and structural contexts.
Description:
In this talk, Fulya Apaydin presents her book project, which examines how outer space has become a new frontier for capitalist expansion. Once conceived as a shared public commons, space is now being reshaped for economic growth through collaborations between private investors and state actors seeking technological, commercial, and strategic advantage.
Building on World-Systems Theory and Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century (1994), the book explores how U.S.-based economic and political elites strive to maintain global dominance through innovation in the tech industry and the extension of capitalist accumulation into extraterrestrial realms. It also analyzes the policies of emerging space powers such as China, alongside the growing involvement of middle-income countries that view space infrastructure as a cornerstone of renewed industrial policy.
While not forecasting the success or failure of these ventures, the book situates the contemporary space race within broader transformations of global capitalism—linking Earth-bound political economies to the evolving geopolitics of outer space. By doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates on hegemony, technology, and the future of capitalist development beyond the planet.
Speaker:
Fulya Apaydin is Associate Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Spain. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and international political economy, focusing on how emerging economies adapt investment and industrial policies under global pressures. She is currently leading projects on the rise of private debt regimes in the Global South and on the new space race as a 21st-century industrial strategy. Apaydin holds a PhD from Brown University and has been a visiting researcher at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Her work has appeared in World Development, Regulation and Governance, Socio-Economic Review, and Review of International Political Economy, among others. She is the author of Technology, Institutions and Labor: Manufacturing Automobiles in Argentina and Turkey (Palgrave, 2018).