State responsibility for non-state actors in times of war: Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty and the law of neutrality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The explosion of non-State actors in outer space has come with enormous corporate and inter-State complexity. Instead of a private US-based company sending a single satellite into orbit, multi-national corporations have plans to send thousands. In-orbit satellites are being bought and sold by companies incorporated in different States. Foreign military departments are putting communications payloads on non-State actor satellites. This thesis looks at the implications of these non-State actors in space performing actions that could affect the neutrality of their licensing State. Article VI of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty attributes all actions of non-State actors in Space to the State responsible for them. The law of neutrality outlines the appropriate conduct of States who are part of an international conflict, or belligerents, and States not part of an international conflict, or neutrals. Therefore, if there were a conflict and a non-State actor from a neutral State were to provide military communications to a belligerent, the non-State actor’s licensing State’s neutrality could be implicated. The analysis herein looks at the corporate structures, the services, and the licensing mechanisms used by various States vis a vis international outer space law and the law of neutrality. I argue that in space, because all actions are attributed to the State and because corporations have increased in complexity, there should be a higher threshold for States to be declared belligerent if their non-State actors provide space-based services to a State at war.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".