Red Earth, Silent Treaties: Reimagining Legal Subjectivity and Temporal Violence in Martian Governance

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-555-3_15How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Mars Colonization; International Space Law; Decolonial Approaches; Common Heritage of Humankind; Planetary Protection

Abstract

As Mars colonization nears, international law remains bound to Earth-centric notions of sovereignty, temporality, and legal subjectivity. Foundational regimes—most notably the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the 1979 Moon Agreement, and related UN resolutions—are ill-equipped to handle the socio-ecological ruptures of extraterrestrial settlement. Treating Mars as a blank canvas risks repeating colonial tropes of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery. This analysis asks whether the common-heritage-of-humankind principle can be reconceived through decolonial, ecological, and Posthuman lenses to forestall capitalist appropriation and erasure on Mars. Drawing on Third World approaches to international law and critiques of linear futurism, we highlight Article II’s narrow ban on national sovereignty (and its silence on corporate claims) and the Moon Agreement’s weak environmental and sharing provisions. We question space law’s anthropocentrism by analogy to Earth’s recent environmental personhood cases, and explore whether erga omnes and intergenerational duties (evident in the Trail Smelter precedent and the Paris climate regime) might extend to space. We also scrutinize the Artemis Accords as a techno-hegemonic detour from multilateralism. Ultimately, we advance an interplanetary constitutionalism grounded in Martian humility, plurality, and justice, calling for a moratorium on mining and an Antarctic-style treaty on planetary protection that embeds equity, sustainability, epistemic justice, and Post-human ethics in off-Earth law.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - E. Prema
AU  - Ragul OV
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/13
TI  - Red Earth, Silent Treaties: Reimagining Legal Subjectivity and Temporal Violence in Martian Governance
BT  - Proceeding of The Future of Life - Legal, Scientific, and Geopolitical Challenges (TFOL2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 235
EP  - 248
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-555-3_15
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-555-3_15
ID  - Prema2026
ER  -