The Airspace Tribunal and Topologies of Air - Visualising Aerial Threat

Conference presentation at the Aeropolitics - on Contemporary Forms of Aerial Power conference at the Teatro dell'architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland.

Airspace and outer space are being rapidly transformed into an ever more complex and instrumentalised space of military and corporate exploitation, with increasingly pervasive and weaponised surveillance, inexorable expansion in aerial warfare, the deployment of unaccountable AI systems in lethal autonomous weapons, growing nuclear threat and unrelenting environmental degradation. This is subjecting global populations to new and complex forms of mass vulnerability and risk. However, the contemporary legal framework does not adequately protect people from these expanding airborne threats. This is also causing long-term, transgenerational trauma and psychological harm. Shona Illingworth will discuss her ongoing work on the Airspace Tribunal, an international people’s tribunal that she established with human rights lawyer Nick Grief in 2018 to consider the case for and against a proposed new human right to live without physical or psychological threat from above, and her interconnected body of artwork, Topologies of Air. She will explore how creative art practices can make visible and critically address the rapid transformation of airspace and outer space and the human and environmental impacts and discuss how the Airspace Tribunal challenges the traditional state-centric view of how international law is created through its collaborative work to develop the human rights dimension of airspace and outer space.