Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Combining Critical Security Studies’ (CSS) sensitivity to power and discourse with STS’s attention to laboratory dynamics (broadly understood), this paper explores space security wargames as “security laboratories” where strategic futures are staged, tested, and made actionable through simulation.

Paper long abstract

Wargaming refers to structured simulation exercises used by military organisations, governments, and think tanks to model and rehearse potential future conflicts, crises, or strategic decisions. Combining Critical Security Studies’ (CSS) sensitivity to power and discourse with STS’s attention to laboratory dynamics (broadly understood), this paper explores space wargames as “security laboratories” where strategic futures are staged, tested, and made actionable through simulation. While CSS has robustly critiqued the discursive framing of threats, it has only begun to attend to the material epistemic infrastructures through which security claims gain traction. Drawing on classic STS concepts—such as epistemic cultures, experimental systems, and the performativity of simulations—we explore how wargaming, as a simulation exercise, generates not only strategic knowledge but also authority and plausibility, shaping what becomes thinkable and actionable in security policy long before crises erupt. Through ethnographic fieldwork at wargaming exercises on space security, we will trace how epistemic-material infrastructures and scenario design co-produce knowledge and legitimise particular threat narratives. Our aim is two-fold: To invite STS scholars to engage more deeply with pressing ethical and geopolitical questions related to military knowledge practices and to offer a novel conceptual lens for mapping the layered interplay of technology, knowledge and policy in international security through shared perspectives between STS and CSS.