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Purpose Recent developments in US rhetoric and policy advocating the militarisation and marketisation of outer space challenge the global commons values and regimes that developed partly in response to decolonisation. These regimes embodied aspirations to post-colonial distributive justice, as well as to international management for peaceful purposes. The purpose of this paper is to argue that global commons values should be defended against these challenges in order to avoid the risk of exporting colonial legacies of injustice into outer space. Design/methodology/approach This paper is an exercise in normative International Political Theory and so develops normative arguments by drawing on approaches in political theory and international law. Findings This paper demonstrates that the commons values endorsed in the aftermath of colonialism retain their relevance in a global politics that remains structured by post-colonial power relations. This paper also demonstrates that these commons values have evolved and found expression in central elements of international law, persisting as resources to be drawn on in normative argument. Originality/value This study places recent moves to assert US hegemony in space in the context of persistent post-colonial power relations and develops novel arguments in renewed support of commons values.

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This paper critically explores the growing assertiveness with which liberalism has approached questions of the just use of force since 9/11. The liberal position rests upon broad claims about the centrality of human rights concerns to considerations of the justice of war. The claim is that a liberal-cosmopolitan respect for human rights forces us to reconsider the conservative, generally prohibitive, position on the use of force defended by traditional just war theory and enshrined in international law. This argument is has been most fully developed by Allen Buchanan in several important books and papers and it is Buchanan's position that forms the basis for the critique of the assertive cosmopolitan attitude to the use of force that is offered in this article. The paper shows that both the just war tradition and those who theorize the ethics of the law of armed conflict have taken the moral and political reality of human rights seriously (in a manner that directly addresses Buchanan's core argument) but that there remain compelling reasons to defend a conservative approach to the use of force.

This article explores the normative international relations theory of Mervyn Frost. Frost's unorthodox approach to questions of human rights offers a way through the political and philosophical morass that has often threatened to obscure the most pressing issues of our time. Significantly, Frost claims to able to ‘construct’ a background justification for international ethics that can unite the demands for sovereign autonomy with declarations of human rights. In doing so Frost attempts to offer an new understanding of universal ethics and thus of the role of human rights in international politics. Acknowledging the importance of this approach, this article examines two issues that arise from Frost's ‘constitutive theory’ and seeks to offer a signpost for the future development of human rights theory.