The Battleground are my goldilocks zone of good writing and good politics.

As those of you who know me from earlier iterations of self (remember before I got scared of the internet and my doctorate got dragged in to a quagmire just as the world imploded?) may remember I wrote for them before - they’re stalwarts but always doing something new.

It’s also a big deal for me - it has been as long long time since I had a ‘home on the internet’ (I can unpack that elsewhere but I guess what I mean is - a publication where I feel my real self is reflected, not a ‘hotel on the internet’ which is how I always saw publications like the Guardian when they kindly let me hang out there one day every once in a while on the comments section).

The last time, in all honesty, was probably way way back in millennial pre-history (we are talking Tumblr vibes) of 2008-2013, when I wrote for This Recording (it still exists in fossil form on a Wordpress! thisrecording.wordpress…God bless the heavens and the genius early Emily Gould writing it contains. I swear to God if I ever get time I will go through this fossil-Wordpress and salvage all its great works for future generations before it Rumpus’-s itself).

Writing for This Recording in my ‘half waitress half celebrity’ era (I had a novel published! I was also broke and heart broken! Oh all my dear ones who graduated the year of the financial crisis) was one of the only times I felt like my ‘outsides matched my insides’ digitally.

The fact I occasionally got commissioned to write for national newspapers (and because I was young and broke the people in my life were, mainly really mean about that? Lol imagine ‘being broke but you wrote one piece for Foreign Policy so all your grad-school frenemies will freeze you out’ levels of micro-dramas; no-one had kids, a mortgage or a permanent-contract job back then and IT SHOWS in how everyone conducted themselves) always felt like cosplaying, but This Recording felt like home.

It wouldn’t be home today, and that’s appropriate, the same way you should feel a little weird going back to your childhood bedroom after 30. But it was something that left me utterly bereft — I mean, ‘changing my name and running away to the end of the world’ levels of bereft — in the aftermath of that era, to feel ‘digitally homeless’, and to not even have the language for it.

This Recording also felt like something I’d have to downplay as I ‘professionalised’ in my 30s - I could put Dr in front of my name now! I had students who would Google me! oh and also pre-MeToo nightmares lurking in my digital eco-system… - not exactly LinkedIn and ‘pleased to announce I attended this conference no-one cares about’ vibes. I felt, for so long, between worlds, and without outlets. For someone who resides in words, there is no greater brutalisation.

So now I have an internet-home again, and it is delightful. I am trying to minimise how insufferable I am being about it, but I have basically 2498273 article ideas I want to write at once, and an actual plan for an actual podcast on the 2010s.

All of which is to say - Lena Dunham’s announcement today that Girls is returning means we are finally out of the wilderness, it has been a long long dark night of the digital soul but millennial cringe is over, and all the writing will return. Should I reopen a Tumblr too?

There is no countdown in international law.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty will not expire in 2027, nor will corporations suddenly acquire legal title to the Moon. But there is a political clock.

The United Nations committee developing principles for space-resource activities plans to produce further draft rules in 2026 and finalise its initial recommendations in 2027.

Decisions made during this window could determine whether humanity’s shared domain is governed collectively or parcelled out through the accumulated power of states and companies that get there first.

When I began to work on space law in the early 2020s, I initially described my mission on space sustainability as “wanting to make sure tech bro billionaires don’t ‘scramble for Africa’ the universe”.

I received pushback from people I respect regarding this phrase, and I take on board their arguments about the limits of my analogy: competition in space is not equivalent to the conquest, dispossession, forced labour and mass violence imposed on African societies by European empires.

Nonetheless, I still believe the comparison highlights a familiar political mechanism: powerful actors write rules around their own capabilities, convert access into control, and present extraction as progress for all.

This, then, is the project of ‘decolonising the cosmos’: not to claim rhetorically that every satellite is an imperial invader, but to ensure that decisions about who makes the rules, whose knowledge counts, who receives the benefits, and who bears the environmental and cultural costs do not reproduce the harms of European colonialism or the same drive for pillage and profit. Instead, these decisions should be guided by the understanding that outer space is a ‘commons’.

Under international law, the Outer Space Treaty enshrines outer space as a ‘commons’.

A Revolutionary Treaty with Unfinished Business

The Outer Space Treaty was an extraordinary achievement. Negotiated during the Cold War, it rejected what might otherwise have seemed the obvious extension of terrestrial power.

Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, could not be subject to “national appropriation” through sovereignty, occupation, or any other means. Its exploration and use would benefit and serve the interests of all countries, “irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development”.

Space would be the “province of all mankind” and open to all states on a basis of equality.

These were not minor concessions. At a moment when European empires had only recently lost formal control over much of Asia and Africa, the treaty refused to turn celestial geography into another field for territorial acquisition. It also prohibited placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit and reserved the Moon and other celestial bodies for peaceful purposes.

At the height of the Cold War, the Treaty was an astonishing achievement, secured in no small part by scientists lobbying their governments to keep space exploration out of geopolitical machinations. Heartbreakingly, it is now out of date—not least because it lacks provisions for non-state actors, even as private enterprise in space grows exponentially.

The treaty’s egalitarian language never eliminated material inequality.

A legal right to explore space is not a launch vehicle, a research budget, or a seat in the rooms where technical standards are set. Formally equal access can coexist with profoundly unequal capacity to exercise it.

As critical space-law scholarship argues, the production of law itself can privilege established space powers even when the resulting texts speak in universal terms.

The treaty also provides no agreed formula for distributing the benefits of space activity. Article I sets out a principle, but not a global institution with the authority to determine what benefit sharing requires, manage common resources or review whether gains are being distributed fairly. Legal scholars continue to disagree about the precise content of the obligation.

The promise exists; the machinery does not.

The Corporate Loophole That is not Quite a Loophole

As noted above, the treaty is often said to have failed to anticipate private space companies, but the issue is more complicated.

Article VI makes states internationally responsible for their “national activities” in space, whether carried out by governments or non-governmental entities. States must authorise and continually supervise private operations.

A company does not escape international law simply because it is privately owned: its licensing state remains responsible for ensuring that its activities comply with the treaty.

The weakness lies elsewhere—in the very realm where tech-bro space enthusiasts are trying to operate.

The treaty regulates businesses principally through states. It contains no sufficiently detailed, globally uniform rules directed at corporations themselves, no international corporate regulator and no comprehensive system for space-traffic management.

Oversight depends heavily on national licensing regimes, although the consequences of a licensed project may extend far beyond the licensing state.

That mismatch is becoming harder to ignore.

In 2026, for example, the US Federal Communications Commission approved a demonstration satellite for Reflect Orbital, which proposes reflecting sunlight toward Earth. It did not approve the much larger constellation the company had envisioned.

But reporting on the project exposed the underlying problem: people elsewhere may experience altered night skies, while international law offers little direct recourse if the responsible state licenses the activity.

The same structure governs resource extraction. Article II prohibits national appropriation, but the treaty does not expressly resolve every question of mining or resource use. It would be inaccurate to declare all extraction unlawful. It is equally misleading to treat permission as settled.

The Artemis Accords state that resource extraction can comply with the treaty, while the United States and some other states have developed national regimes designed to enable commercial use. The Accords do not amend international law or bind non-participants. They do, however, help establish practices around which investment, infrastructure and expectations can gather.

This is how enclosure may occur without anyone planting a flag.

A state authorises a company to install equipment, occupy operational space, and build systems on which later participants depend. Each step may be defended as lawful use rather than an assertion of sovereignty. Over time, however, technical possession can harden into de facto control, leaving multilateral negotiations to accommodate facts already created by the wealthiest actors.

Article VI’s elegance is also its weakness. In 1967, holding states answerable for every “national activity” was a powerful way to prevent governments from outsourcing conduct they could not lawfully undertake themselves. But a system mediated through states assumes that governments are both willing and able to discipline the firms they license.

Today, launch capacity, communications infrastructure, and commercial ambition are concentrated in corporations whose revenues, technical expertise, and political access can rival those of public regulators. The state remains legally responsible, yet may also be economically dependent on the operator it is meant to supervise.

This creates an incentive problem that the treaty does not solve. A government seeking investment and strategic advantage can adopt a permissive interpretation of its duty to supervise. Another state may object, but no standing global authority can impose a single licensing standard, halt an unsafe project, or order a company to compensate everyone affected by cumulative environmental harm.

The result is not a lawless frontier. It is a frontier governed through a patchwork of national decisions, with the most powerful states and firms best placed to turn their preferred interpretation into practice.

That distinction matters politically. Calling space “unregulated” allows states to evade responsibility for the commercial order they are actively constructing. Calling the existing rules adequate allows companies to hide behind licences that reduce a global obligation to a domestic box-ticking exercise.

The real demand is twofold: states must be held to the promises they made in 1967, and corporations whose operations reshape a shared environment must take on duties that do not disappear at the border of the state that licensed them.

An Orbit Filling Faster Than Law Can Respond

The scale of the transformation is visible.

According to figures reported by Le Monde, 14,690 satellites were in orbit in June 2025—three times the 2020 total. Announced constellation projects could take the number to 100,000 by 2030, although that projection depends on those plans proceeding.

Commercial power is driving much of this acceleration. The Space Foundation estimated that commercial activity accounted for 78% of the $613bn global space economy in 2024. That figure describes the economy’s financial composition, not corporate ownership of space.

But concentration is also apparent in orbit.

SpaceX disclosed that Starlink represented approximately 75% of all active manoeuvrable satellites as of 31 March 2026; independent tracking reported by Space.com put the number of active Starlink satellites at 10,865 in late July.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are therefore not merely mascots for a cultural fantasy about conquering the final frontier. Their companies are helping build the launch systems and satellite networks through which that fantasy acquires material power.

As the Guardian has warned, the risk is an enclosure movement that transfers shared resources into the hands of a few.

This concentration does not prove that one company owns low-Earth orbit. It does mean that operational decisions made by a private firm can shape the environment in which every other operator must function.

When infrastructure becomes indispensable, governance through nominally neutral market access risks disguising private rule. The physical consequences are already severe.

The European Space Agency’s 2026 Space Environment Report says exponential growth in new payloads continued in 2025, driven by more frequent launches, rideshares, large constellations, and a shift toward commercial operators.

The agency estimates that roughly 54,000 objects larger than 10 cm cross low Earth orbit, including about 9,300 active payloads. Its models indicate another 1.2m objects between 1 cm and 10 cm, and 130m between 1 mm and 1 cm.

Those smaller figures are modelled estimates, not catalogues of individually tracked fragments. They nonetheless describe an environment in which even a tiny object can damage a spacecraft travelling at orbital velocity.

information sharing and debris management, but implementation is voluntary.

What Decolonisation Would Require

The immediate task is not to discard the Outer Space Treaty. It is to make its universal promises operational before unequal practices become too expensive or politically difficult to reverse.

First, states should turn the treaty’s “benefit and interests of all countries” language into procedures.

That need not require an instant, universally accepted distribution formula. It does require transparent decision-making, meaningful participation by less powerful states, assessment of who gains and who bears the risk, and review mechanisms that can challenge arrangements that turn nominal openness into durable exclusion.

Second, international rules should establish minimum corporate duties instead of relying solely on uneven national supervision. Licensing states would retain their responsibilities under Article VI, while companies would face common requirements for registration, collision avoidance, data sharing, environmental assessment, debris mitigation, and end-of-life disposal. A global traffic-management framework is increasingly essential infrastructure, not a bureaucratic ornament.

Third, states must agree on resource rules multilaterally before unilateral policy becomes the default.

The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has established a working group whose 2026–27 workplan provides the present political opening. Its emerging principles are non-binding and remain under development. Treat them as the beginning of governance, not its completion.

That process must also guard against a familiar form of procedural capture: treating standards shaped by first movers’ technologies and business models as politically neutral. Representation after the essential architecture is set is not shared rule-making.

Less powerful states need resources to participate consistently, obtain independent technical advice, and challenge proposals that hide distributive consequences in engineering language. Otherwise, “consensus” will simply ratify inequalities created outside the negotiating room.

Fourth, environmental protection must extend beyond the narrow question of whether an activity immediately interferes with another spacecraft.

Article IX requires due regard, the prevention of harmful contamination, and consultation when harmful interference may occur. These principles must be made enforceable in ways tailored to mass constellations, resource operations, and projects that affect the night sky.

Participation also matters on Earth.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples protects self-determination, cultural integrity and participation. It does not allocate ownership of celestial bodies, nor does it automatically govern every orbital activity.

However, where projects affect Indigenous cultural relationships with the sky or use facilities on Indigenous lands, meaningful participation cannot be replaced by a claim that space belongs abstractly to everyone.

None of this guarantees an egalitarian space economy.

International institutions both reproduce and restrain power, and states with launch capacity will not easily surrender their advantage. Yet refusing to negotiate distribution, accountability and environmental limits does not preserve a neutral frontier. It allows private capacity and national licensing decisions to set the rules through accumulation.

The next two years are therefore not a deadline imposed by the treaty. They are an opportunity to influence the rules while the United Nations process remains open—and before today’s commercial architecture becomes tomorrow’s common sense.

The question is not whether humanity will use outer space, but whether that use will entail shared access under collective limits or a celestial order in which wealth arrives first, and law follows.

Photograph courtesy of NASA Kennedy. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Looking back, the timing of that shift was almost eerily aligned with a global pivot. It happened just before the world fractured under the onset of COVID-19, precisely as I secured tenure at an Icelandic university. Moving to Iceland—with its vast, otherworldly topography, subarctic silence, and endless skies (I was worried I would get bored of watching the aurora but instead I got more mesmerised each time) —offered a rare moment of spatial and mental reset. It was there, against the backdrop of an impending global lockdown, that I found myself deeply immersing in space law. It proved transformative. For the first time in a very long while, I felt an intellectual thaw. I felt focused on the future again.

Before that shift, I had been profoundly, almost completely, blocked. The preceding decade had been heavy and wounding. The brutal, agonising collapse of the Arab revolutions—movements into which I had poured so much of my early academic work, intellectual commitment, and emotional energy—coincided directly with the end of my doctorate. Watching those hopes disintegrate into violent counter-revolutions, feeling like my doctorate was ‘an elephant’s graveyard of my dead friends’ left me in a state of total existential “year zero.” My sense of political and academic purpose felt thoroughly shattered. I began to see academia as a cage, where it had once been the only place I had felt free.

This internal despair was relentlessly reinforced by the wider political descent of the late 2010s. Watching the unraveling logic of Brexit, the rise of Trumpism, and the entrenchment of Netanyahu’s politics made the global trajectory feel utterly retrograde. At the same time, platforms like Twitter, which in the early 2010s had briefly promised a space for internationalist solidarity and real-time civic discourse, degenerated into reactionary, toxic sludge. I felt paralysed, alienated from the political present, and unable to imagine a viable way forward.

Transitioning into space law in Iceland was not an escape into sci-fi escapism; it was a radical realignment. It provided a way to re-engage with foundational questions of justice, governance, and power on a grander, long-term canvas.

So I am extremely excited to be invited to talk at Cambridge (and particularly at Jesus College, where the Intellectual Forum under the guidance of Julian Huppert is doing more interesting things than just about anywhere else in Oxbridge). For years, particularly in the long shadow of the Arab revolutions, I wrestled with a persistent internal inhibition—the feeling that “it wasn’t my place” to speak out frequently or prominently on complex regional struggles where questions of representation were rightly fraught.

Space, however, fundamentally alters that ethical equation. The stars do not belong to any single sovereign state, empire, or private corporation; the stars belong to all of us. Advocating for outer space does not require an invitation or a special mandate, because space is the ultimate global commons. There is a pressing, almost terrifying urgency to this work right now. We are living through a critical juncture where outer space is being rapidly carved up by militarising, extractive, and colonising forces. If we do not actively fight to secure and protect space as a commons today, we will simply export our worst terrestrial dynamics—imperialism, resource enclosure, and armed conflict—into the cosmos.

Crucially, this work on space is not a departure from my previous focus, but its direct continuation. My early academic life was spent examining post-conflict constitutionalism—specifically asking: when a society emerges from crisis, who gets to sit at the table to draft the rules that govern us all?

Space law is, at its core, the exact same inquiry. As human activity in orbit and on lunar surfaces accelerates, we are effectively writing the constitutional framework for humanity’s multi-planetary future. Who sits at the table when we determine how orbital trajectories are managed, how lunar resources are safeguarded, or how non-weaponisation is enforced? Is space governance going to be written exclusively by a handful of wealthy spacefaring nations and billionaire tech monopolists, or will it be crafted to protect all of humanity, including non-spacefaring nations and future generations? Space law is post-conflict constitutionalism raised to an orbital scale: an opportunity to establish just, egalitarian rules before catastrophe occurs, rather than attempting to rebuild amongst the ruins.

As November approaches, I feel a genuine mix of excitement and vulnerability about venturing back out into the public square. Re-emerging into public life means navigating a landscape that looks vastly different from the one I backed away from years ago.

Since the last time I was “very online,” I received an autism diagnosis. (Yes, I know everyone on the internet is suddenly autistic and ADHD these days, but given that I literally had Lego instead of a mother, I think my diagnosis was hugely overdue.) Receiving it so late in life brought a sharp, gendered realisation. I look back at all the men at university who were given every leeway to be the eccentric, “profound intellectuals,” while my own traits and sensory overloads were simply interpreted as “erratic.” There is a deep wistfulness for my former self when I look back at those years. I also realise I did deeply damaging things to my brain simply by pushing through burnouts without knowing my diagnosis—a legacy I am now pouring an immense amount of energy into unpicking and healing.

Understanding my neurodivergence now is immensely clarifying, but it also means I approach public engagement with far greater boundaries and intention. Social media has transformed dramatically in the interim, becoming even more chaotic and fractured, which is why I am intentionally getting support with my social media management this time around.

I have no interest in feeding the outrage algorithms or getting drawn back into the noise. I’ve tried to draw lines to demarcate new chapters as best I can (a new surname for one thing; spending the interregnum of life that was the covid years reworking my entire social and intellectual life to cut the weight and loss and pain of the 2010s off m). I feel in retrospect that a lot of the pain of my earlier attempts to again publicly came from my total self-consciousness, which comes from being young of course, but also comes from wading into arguments that are beyond you. Space sustainability does not feel like the same terrain — I am not the first or most significant person to engage it it, but I do feel I have finally found my life’s focus: to advocate for securing outer space as a commons for everyone.

Ten years after a young scholar’s broken body was found alongside the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria, a court in Rome has delivered a verdict. On a grey afternoon in the capital, four Egyptian intelligence officers were sentenced in absentia for the abduction, torture, and murder of Giulio Regeni.

For a decade, the Italian state, Giulio’s family, and human rights investigators have fought through a labyrinth of institutional obstruction, diplomatic cynicism, and state-sponsored silence to bring some fraction of truth into a public chamber.

The ruling is a monument to the relentless tenacities of Giulio’s parents, Paola and Claudio Regeni, and their legal counsel. Yet as the courtroom clears and the news banners roll past, we are left asking the haunting question that attends so many long-delayed legal reckonings: is this legal resolution the closest we will ever get to closure?

The last ten years have made me obsessed with the idea of closure—both how to achieve it and, simultaneously, whether it even exists. I found myself using demarcations of time: ten years since Raba’a (the massacre in 2013, which got me into trouble because I called it a massacre), five years since my viva, ten — and then suddenly 15, out of nowhere — years since 2011. I even got as close to woo-woo as I allow myself in reading about the idea of seven-year cycles.

Maybe this is it. Today. I was always drawn to law by how it offers finalities. A court case doesn’t change the inner world directly, but it draws a distinct line. It presents a binary: did this thing happen or not, did it lead to that other thing or not.

In any legal sense, the verdict offers an undeniable record. It establishes, beyond the reach of state denial, that a twenty-eight-year-old doctoral student from Cambridge University was targeted, tracked, tortured over several days, and executed by agents of the Egyptian domestic security apparatus. But judicial truth and existential closure inhabit different realms. When state actors murder an academic for asking questions, sentence them in absentia, and remain safely shielded inside the borders of a dictatorship that continues to receive billions in Western trade and military aid, closure becomes a convenient political fiction. The perpetrators walk the streets of Cairo; the regime that authorised their atmosphere of impunity remains in place; and Giulio remains dead.

The Aftermath of the Revolution

For many of us who lived, worked, or wrote on the region during the long sunrise of the Arab Spring and its subsequent dark descent, Giulio’s murder in early 2016 marked a decisive, shattering threshold. It was, in many ways, the moment the revolution truly ended—not because Giulio’s life was inherently more precious than the tens of thousands of Egyptians who had been killed, disappeared, or imprisoned by the Sisi regime, but because of what his death signified about the expanding boundaries of totalitarian violence.

It is necessary to state this carefully, for there is an undeniable problem in how Western commentary perpetually foregrounds European narratives amid the vast, systemic horror of the post-2013 Egyptian counter-revolution. Tens of thousands of Egyptian citizens—activists, journalists, lawyers, ordinary bystanders, and students—have been swallowed whole by Egypt’s prison archipelago. Their names rarely reach the front pages of European newspapers; their families do not receive solemn audience in the halls of European parliaments. To speak of Giulio’s death as an end risks participating in that very hierarchy of grief, elevating a white, European researcher above the thousands of local bodies upon whose suffering the military dictatorship was rebuilt.

And yet, Giulio’s murder held a specific, structural terror. Giulio was engaged in something so pure: independent, empirical, socio-legal research. He was researching independent trade unions—the everyday organising of street vendors in Cairo seeking dignity and economic survival. He was doing what doctoral scholars are trained to do: listening, documenting, reading social dynamics through the lens of lived experience.

When a regime decides that even this—the rigorous inquiry of a young scholar with a notebook—is an existential threat requiring physical destruction, the rules of intellectual life are fundamentally rewritten. It signalled that academic freedom was no longer merely restricted by state censorship or visa denials; it was subject to summary execution. Academics, researchers, and fieldworkers were no longer observers outside the line of fire; the inquiry itself was classified as subversion.

The Swimming-Underwater Years

For those of us working in academic research and socio-legal studies at that exact moment, the news of Giulio’s disappearance and the subsequent revelation of his torture hit with a physical force.

I completed my own doctorate in the summer of 2016, just months after Giulio was killed. That summer, which should have been marked by the satisfaction of finishing years of sustained research, felt completely drained of meaning. Moving forward into an academic career—attending conferences, pitching research proposals, applying for fellowships, navigating the polite bureaucracy of higher education—felt bizarre, almost indecent. How could one sit in institutional seminars discussing legal theory or human rights methodologies when a colleague had just been tortured to death for engaging in that exact work?

The ten years since have felt, for me, like a strange, disorienting experience of swimming underwater—a prolonged, suspended half-life. The sense of forward momentum that usually characterises post-doctoral intellectual life dissolved into static.

That disorientation was only compounded when my own doctoral thesis was dragged into its own institutional quagmire in 2019. Because my research touched upon sensitive political and socio-legal dynamics, the thesis was placed under a safety embargo to protect interviewees and field contacts. Yet in the vacuum of institutional silence, rumours began to circulate within academic networks that I had not completed the degree, or that something improper had occurred.

Carrying the weight of a painful safety embargo while hearing whispered assertions that your work does not exist creates a peculiar kind of psychological fatigue. It leaves you feeling doubly displaced: unable to celebrate the completion of your work out of concern for field safety, and simultaneously erased by the institution you worked to serve. The intellectual world, which once promised a space for truth-seeking, began to feel like a cold terrain of risk management and whispered liabilities.

Institutional Accountability and Cambridge University

As we reflect on the Rome ruling, the focus naturally falls upon the Egyptian state apparatus and the four individuals sentenced today. But state violence does not occur in an institutional vacuum. There must also be a rigorous, uncomfortable accounting within the Western academic institutions that send young researchers into high-risk environments.

Cambridge University—where Giulio was enrolled as a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies—needs to undergo a real, transparent process of institutional reflection. Thus far, the university’s response over the past decade has too often resembled the defensive self-preservation typical of elite higher education institutions. Much like the broader conversations surrounding institutional duty of care—seen in cases like that of the late Professor Jason Arday and wider critiques of institutional culture—there is a deep-seated reluctance within elite universities to acknowledge structural failings.

The primary moral and criminal fault for Giulio Regeni’s murder lies squarely at the doors of the Egyptian security services. However, Cambridge University, along with the broader higher education sector, cannot absolve itself of duty of care questions. Academic institutions frequently treat risk assessments as bureaucratic compliance exercises rather than dynamic, ongoing safety frameworks. Furthermore, doctoral supervisors and department heads must possess realistic, up-to-date knowledge of the security environments in which their students operate, particularly under hyper-authoritarian regimes where everyday topics like trade unionism are viewed as national security threats. This is compounded by early-career researchers feeling enormous implicit pressure to secure high-impact, original field data to survive an increasingly competitive academic job market, which sometimes leads them to push boundaries without adequate institutional backup.

While no institutional protocol can entirely eliminate the hazard of an unhinged authoritarian state, elite universities have a profound moral obligation to ensure that young scholars are not dispatched into volatile environments with little more than an ethics approval form and a list of readings.

Protecting the Scholars of Tomorrow

If we are to honour Giulio Regeni’s memory in any meaningful sense beyond courtroom speeches and solemn press releases, we must build concrete, binding mechanisms to protect researchers working in high-risk zones. Academic freedom cannot remain an abstract theoretical value celebrated in university charters while early-career researchers are left entirely exposed in the field.

To begin with, fieldwork protocols in high-risk jurisdictions should be evaluated not merely by departmental committees focused on institutional liability, but by independent experts with deep, localised knowledge of political and intelligence environments. Universities must also establish rapid-response crisis protocols for instances when a researcher is detained, questioned, or goes silent in the field, ensuring immediate legal representation and diplomatic escalations rather than waiting on backchannel developments.

Simultaneously, the higher education sector must address the structural pressure on PhD students to undertake high-risk research to stand out in a hyper-competitive job market, valuing methodological safety over sensational access. Early-career scholars conducting qualitative socio-legal research should undergo rigorous operational security training, including encrypted communications, data minimisation, and protocols for protecting research participants. Finally, higher education sector bodies must establish clear, standardised protections for scholars whose theses are embargoed for safety reasons, ensuring that safety-driven embargoes cannot be weaponised, misinterpreted, or used to undermine a scholar’s professional standing and qualification records.

Beyond the Courtroom

Today’s ruling in Rome provides a vital measure of legal clarity. Four names have been recorded in the annals of judicial history; four officers have been identified as the torturers of a brilliant young man.

But as the headlines subside and the legal proceedings conclude, the persistent loss remains. For the family of Giulio Regeni, for his colleagues, and for an entire generation of scholars whose faith in the world was fractured in the winter of 2016, there is no simple return to normal. The ruling offers a truth, but it cannot offer restoration.

The best we can do—the only decent thing left to do—is to refuse the comfort of easy closure, to insist that our universities account for their duty of care, and to ensure that no future scholar is ever left to face the dark alone.

Now, that period of constant transit gives way to a new chapter. This autumn, I am beginning a new teaching post at a university set within the grounds of a London park. There is something singular about London in the autumn, particularly where the formal city yields to cultivated nature. The park in late September and October becomes a landscape of gold and bronze, where the crisp air carries the damp smell of fallen leaves and the distant, low hum of central London. Stepping onto a campus framed by line after line of trees, watching students gather in the morning mist on lawns that feel both secluded from and deeply connected to the city, brings a welcome sense of arrival after years of being on the move.

This transition also marks a shift for this space. For the last five years, much of my formal writing and academic research has been focused on outer space law, environmental governance, and international legal policy. That technical work continues elsewhere, although I might rip off the band-aid by writing one final piece (for publication elsewhere) on how I became a ‘space law expert’ from being a ‘human rights and Arab constitutions’ person. Here, however, I want to cultivate a somewhat broader conversation. This Substack will increasingly serve as a venue to write more expansive, essayistic reflections on the state of higher education, the nature of academic labour, and the university itself. It feels urgent to write about the university not merely as an administrative engine or a credentialing institution, but as a genuine commons—a shared intellectual sanctuary that must be actively stewarded, protected, and preserved against the forces of hyper-commodification and fragmentation.

The concept of the commons has increasingly animated my thinking across several disparate fields. We tend to think of the commons in physical terms: the shared pastures of traditional legal history, the high seas governed by international maritime law, or the fragile frozen expanses of the Arctic. We also see it in the political and democratic imagination, in the brief and transformational reclamation of public squares like Tahrir, where collective space becomes a vehicle for shared human possibility. The university, at its absolute best, belongs to this same conceptual lineage. It is a shared ecosystem of knowledge, inquiry, and critical thought that depends entirely on collective care for its survival.

Looking back, the breakdown of my friendship group in the aftermath of my doctoral studies felt like nothing short of an existential fracture. I mean this seriously: the anxiety attacks were worse than any induced by the horrors I’d witnessed in my work. In the dense, insular ecosystem of postgraduate academia, social circles do not merely provide company; they mirror back your intellect, your values, and your sense of purpose. One of the things R F Kuang draws out so perfectly in her fiction, particularly Babel and Katabasis, is how these worlds become enclosed universes. When my circle disintegrated, it triggered an acute sense of total identity loss. Worse, that personal grief did not happen in a vacuum—it unfolded alongside the collective grief of watching the hopes of the Egyptian revolution fade into a painful, complex silence (being able to put Dr in front of my name as a result felt like such a debasement, I thought, in my grief years, that ‘academia is evil, to allow that’). At the time, the loss of those shared intellectual and emotional spaces felt like a total collapse of worldmaking. The personal and the political fused into a single, overwhelming sense of ending. And then the world fell apart as I was digesting it.

I was walking through Waterstones in Cambridge last week and came across Brett Easton Ellis’s latest novel and texted my friend as a joke “am I basically Brett Easton Ellis without kinks? At sixty will I still be writing about closed little worlds of people in intense environments?” I’ve never written a novel that wasn’t a campus novel, and I spent a whole two weeks this summer trying to cajole a friend into making a podcast with me called Campus Novel, until he said the line-from-an-Aaron-Sorkin-script-I-think? putdown “you know, sometimes you’re really not as cute as you think you are.”

By which I mean, I think a lot about the dynamics of a group of people in cloistered worlds, a lot, and, like everyone who isn’t actually a trained psychologist by profession, I would deploy all the therapy-speak of our age (‘toxic dynamics’, ‘narcissistic triangulation’, ‘projecting’) as hamfistedly as any other civilian trying to navigate — huh, people, in their people-iness, they’re a lot of work but also rewarding, non? (Bjork, the Genius Queen Goddess that she is, summed this up better than any of us:

During the pandemic, it was often noted that one of the subtler social ills of COVID-19 was the subtle erosion of our parasocial and peripheral relationships—a phenomenon explored so well in The Atlantic’s piece on how the pandemic erased entire categories of friendship. Those casual acquaintances, regular faces, and weak ties anchor us to a broader community. When those background figures vanished, our social worlds contracted dramatically, forcing us to lean entirely on our innermost circles or retreat into isolation. Experiencing that collapse underscored how much of our emotional stability relies on the ambient connections that rarely occupy the forefront of our mind.

My grandmother, the person in my life who was dearest to me, with whom I partly lived for several years in Runcorn, was I think, the epitome of the figure of ‘social glue’ — everyone knew Ivy, at the church, the schools, every shop in Runcorn — but only in Iceland (where I was living during the pandemic) have I since experienced the phenomenon of social bonds that meant that everyone felt their value. When I came back to the UK in ‘late covid’ in 2021, I was hit by a multiple-shock — how degraded the country had become by the horrifying choices made by the Tories; by how badly the health service had collapsed; by — how lonely and atomised everyone was.

After COVID, still terrified of the internet and the written word, determined to “do things with my hands” and feeling a guilt at ‘having been useless during a pandemic’, I took up care work and volunteering that led me into friendships with people five decades older than I am—and these friendships are now the most nourishing and enriching friendships of my life.

One of the reasons I ran away from journalism in the late 2010s, including deactivating my Twitter account which had been a core component of my identity in the early 2010s, was because I could no longer in emotional honesty sustain the distinction between who was a friend and who was a professional contact. It felt that operating in that grey area degraded everyone with whom I interacted; as Joan Didion famously wrote, a journalist is always selling someone out. Operating in that manner was—as I reached my mid-30s and the prospect of becoming a mother was heavy on my mind—stripping me of my humanity.

By this point, the idea that Oxford is evil and Cambridge is good is practically a core part of my identity, but every time I go to central Oxford I remember it is my home whether I like it or not for one very simple reason—I recognise people; the waitress, the old professor who sings opera on his bike, the porter at the lodge. Those understated recognitions remind me that belonging is not always about chosen intimacy, but about being rooted in a shared landscape over time.

With the perspective of time, what once felt like an irreparable rupture can now be read as part of a natural life cycle. Human relationships undergo seasons of convergence and dispersion. There is a popular sociological adage often shared alongside these reflections: if a friendship survives seven years, it will last a lifetime. If five years can return us to strangers, seven years transforms a relationship into a permanent fixture of our personal geometry.

The honest truth is, back in the 2010s, I thought my closest friend today was obnoxious. I met him in the cloistered little petri dish of academia, where all the bickering little in-fighting hides itself under the guise of intellectual high-mindedness, and he was demarcated as The Enemy. He was non-woke, deeply dismissive of the humanities, and—even worse—he had broken a female friend’s heart. I literally had that line from Mean Girls playing on a loop in my head: “that’s just, like, the rules of feminism.”

Then 2019 hit. My world was caving in under the combined weight of processing large-scale and small-scale trauma—the lingering grief over the end of the Egyptian revolution and the devastating dissolution of my old academic circle. Out of nowhere, while the people I thought were my bedrock vanished, he was the one who actually stepped into the breach. He sat with me through the wreckage, showing up with practical support and zero pretense. Covid hit six months later (in case you’re wondering why you didn’t hear from me since I got my Associate Professorship in 2019, my 2010s-to-2020 segue was this: Getting tenure! Getting doxxed a week later! Getting in trouble with an authoritarian country! Friendship breakups because of the doxxing! Older sister in a bushfire! Phew, things can calm down now, oh wait a month later let’s have an unprecedented global health crisis, in which my closest friend and family member will both be directly on the front line. Oy).

Looking back, it was a massive wake-up call about how ridiculous our intellectual and social silos can be. In an era where we are constantly encouraged to run everyone through an exhaustive ideological purity test before letting them in, my closest friendship ended up being forged with someone I once wrote off entirely, and taught me that warmth, loyalty, and actual human decency don’t always come packaged in the political or discipline-specific aesthetics we expect. Sometimes the people who pull you through the dark are the ones you originally thought you had nothing in common with at all.

While our culture obsessively anatomises romantic heartbreak, friendship breakups remain curiously undertheorised, treated as minor side effects of growing up rather than pivotal moral events. An article in The Atlantic famously asked what if friendship, not romance, were the core of life, pushing against a cultural hierarchy that places romantic love on a pedestal while treating platonic bonds as secondary. (I remember I posted this on Facebook — heh, Facebook — when it first came out and someone commented underneath “literally only single people believe this, Heather.”

In the mid-2010s, there was a quiet, insistent urge among a certain cohort of us—moving through NGOs, academic corridors, and freelance cultural criticism—to document the friction where bureaucracy grinds down human fragility. We spent a lot of time writing about systemic precarity, searching for art that could capture structural breakdown without flattening it into sentimentality.

Five years after Jack Thorne’s television film Help (broadcast in 2021 and starring Jodie Comer), it strikes me as the single most vital artifact to emerge from the pandemic era. It captures something about institutional abandonment that essayists and epidemiologists spent years trying to formulate.

To watch Comer’s performance as Sarah, a care home worker in Liverpool, is to experience a visceral jolt of recognition. Long before the pandemic altered the vocabulary of everyday life, I worked briefly as a support worker in care settings. It was work defined by small, deliberate rituals: the mechanics of turning a mattress, the specific weight of an elderly body leaning into you, the quiet negotiation of dignity amidst physical decline. When I returned to care work in the strange, suspended stillness after the initial lockdowns, those physical realities were abruptly overlaid with a terrifying, bureaucratic absurdism—the sudden scarcity of basic safety gear, the agonising isolation of residents, the heavy silence of halls where routine had turned into triage.

Help understands this shift with surgical precision. The film does not rely on sweeping tragic grandiosity; instead, it locates its horror in the details. It maps the micro-geography of a care home—the fluorescent-lit corridors, the plastic aprons, the slow-motion collapse of a system whose cracks were intentionally ignored long before any virus arrived.

What makes it the defining piece of art from that period is how it refuses the comfortable narrative of “applause for heroes.” Comer’s character is not a saintly archetype; she is a worker trying to keep human beings alive in a setting designed around cost-efficiency rather than care. Her bond with Tony (played with devastating grace by Stephen Graham) isn’t romanticised; it is grounded in the labour of presence.

Five years on, as collective memory attempts to smooth over the raw edges of those years into abstract statistics and political talking points, the film remains stubbornly concrete. It reminds us that the crisis was not merely a natural disaster, but an institutional choice—one that fell heaviest on the people inside those quiet, suburban care home walls.

I wanted to write, very briefly, about Cambridge, and clinging on to narratives past their sell-by date. Because the events of recent weeks have forced a reckoning in me that it will take me some time to digest.

I had a narrative. It was such a strong narrative I plotted out a seven-book children’s novel series on which I planned to dedicate much of the next decade (Pullman started writing His Dark Materials at 47 so I thought, ok that will be my timeline, get all your other novels out the way and then at 47 start writing your life’s work), about two cities with magical libraries and maps that led into other worlds, one where the knowledge was used for good and one where the knowledge was used for evil. The narrative almost became part of my identity. I made a hundred jokes. And brought it to several therapy sessions at one point, I think, drawing my therapist a map….

The narrative was about Cambridge, being the good one. Or, more specifically, “Oxford being the evil twin of Cambridge”. With my friend with whom I am working on a book about Tolkien, I’d joke “Cambridge is the shire and Oxford is Mordor”, or I’d text him “I’m back in Mordor this summer, send solidarity” (Oh the years I couldn’t set foot in Oxford without having an anxiety attack). The binary worked because it was, to an extent, anchored in truth:

Cambridge is about knowledge, Oxford is about power.

Cambridge was Crick and Watson discovering DNA, Oxford was Bullingdon club sociopaths cosplaying their future role running the empire. Cambridge has the Nobel prize winners; Oxford the narcissistic-disordered-Prime-Ministers. In the 1990s, when my family moved from the north west to Cambridge, we used to see Stephen Hawking crossing the bridges by the backs. Nothing bad could happen in Cambridge (except, of course, the Soham murders, which leaves a watermark in the lives of my teenage-year'd friends) because Cambridge was further away from the poison-cauldron of Britain’s nastiest machinations of power and class — it wasn’t classless, going to state school in Cambridgeshire changed the trajectory of my life and middle-class-ified me in ways going to the best schools back in Runcorn never could have (when I did get to Mordor, as an undergraduate, my still-favourite politics tutor taught me about “class realignment or class dealignment” during the post-war consensus and I realised most my friends were the offspring of that little hiccup of history in which, through the imperfect-but-useful grammar school system, their parents — mainly fathers, because the grammar school system was highly gendered — ‘made it out’, only for the lake to freeze over again and for us, again, to all die in the class in which we’re born).

“Oxford is the evil twin” worked as a narrative partly because there was enough evidence (Bullingdon club; PPE-as-bootcamp-of-empire; my own horrendous experiences). Plus binaries are a fun gimmick to lean in to — Yale is the evil twin of Havard, for instance, and Australia is the evil twin of Canada (I’m Australian and studied at McGill so I’m allowed to say that); like Springfield and Shelbyville, we understand places by that which they are not. I used to take the hour long bus between Jerualem and Tel Aviv thinking of how they are opposites and twins — Jerusalem as history and Tel Aviv as future — in the same way I think much of how I understand myself was born out my twin-like relationship with my older sister. My older sister was a maths genius, so I would be a twin-opposite and be of languages, words. (Once, in Mordor, as an undergraduate, I was walking outside the Radcliffe Camera and a young woman ran up to me and threw her arms around me shouting "[my sister’s name] I haven’t seen you all term!” She was studying maths in an adjacent college and I suppose to some we had twin-like resemblance; so I made clear I was an opposite.

One of the corollaries, for me, of the ugly saga that was the Cambridge Analytica scandal was that, for once, Cambridge was being the evil twin (Oxford Analytica is a respectable think tank my friend was working for during our Egyptian revolution years when, well, when the Egyptian revolution did what it did to our lives). I used to catch the X5 bus* back to Cambridge at the end of term and feel this palpable relief that I was returning to the shire, where I didn’t have to watch my back, where there was no nasty cliquey gossip because, well, mainly because people had work to be getting on with. (*20 years ago people were saying “within a year or two here will be a train between Oxford and Cambridge” and I might write another day on how that is all finally transpiring). Even this week I was watching Ludwig and lazily (as I always do) plotting out my own crime novel/ crime tv series idea, and thinking “Cambridge and crossword-setting — perfect, perfect”. I think my Twitter (lol, Twitter, oh the 2010s and their metastases…) bio still reads “always Cambridge never evil Oxford” as a nod to the years in which I had anxiety attacks as the train went past Didcot Parkway.

But it doesn’t work. The crutch I needed as a little map to navigate the world, like psychological hopscotch — don’t jump on Oxford, floor is lava, Cambridge is safe zone (I’ve been told this is one of my autistic traits, mapping out places, objects and concepts as opposites) was already ruptured years ago — ten years ago precisely, after my academic-twin, studying at Cambridge, was murdered and, well, nothing came of any investigation at the university.

And nothing, I know, will come of any investigation into the events surrounding the hounding and death of Arday. I won’t comment on that further except to say that I agree with Ash Sarkar’s piece in Novara that the only reason this became news was because of the racist media, so any ‘academic misconduct’ or otherwise, is a footnote to the main horror of how this played out. I also agree with Charlotte Proudman’s point that no white man accused of — or found to have committed — sexual misconduct, ever faced the level of hounding Arday did. I am, of course, mainly horrified at the British media, a self-ingesting body-horror beast that I once got close enough to that I ran away to the edge of the world and changed my name to try to de-pollute myself from its clutches. But if Cambridge tries to pass all the buck to the vile xenophobes at the Telegraph and has no self-reflection on its own role in setting up Arday (without mentorship, media training, or being treated as a human being rather than a ‘cipher’ — the most dehumanising way in which the worst of both the right and the left interact with other human beings), it will break my neat narrative in two completely. I remember a friend once saying to me as her parents divorced “the worst feeling in the world is to be on bad terms with both your parents, when they both hate each other — who are you then, if you’re cut off at both ends?” That’s how I feel now about Cambridge; cut the other side of the rope.

Cambridge Analytica, Giulio, Arday — Cambridge isn’t the angel to Oxford’s devil, they’re both as grubby as each other; a plague on both their houses.

I was on BBC Radio 4 comedy last week, with a teeny tiny little cameo at the end of my amazing friend Andrew Hunter Murray’s show, The Naked Week. Waiting backstage before I went on to the stage in front of the live audience in Brighton I felt like it was 2005, and I was about to go on stage at the Wheatsheaf, the pub in Oxford where I performed weekly with my improv group as an undergraduate. The excitement was just as fresh; the energy just as palpable as ever. Except this time I was backstage with real professional comedians who did this for a living. One of them, Andy, I’ve been fortunate enough to know since we were little 19 year olds together, performing weekly at the Wheatsheaf and in summers at the Edinburgh festival. Except in the meantime he has written three novels and become one of the deservedly-recognised famously-funny people of my generation.

I had an amazing time. And then I went home and had a 3am meltdown. Why hadn’t I kept up comedy? The Edinburgh festivals had been the highlight of my undergraduate years. But then, I’d run away from Oxford and England as soon as I graduated (that prehistoric novel I wrote may explain why…); admittedly to McGill in Montreal, another epicentre of comedy, but I never kept it up. At some point, members of my improv cohort began to bubble up into national recognition and I was so delighted for them, but never took it as a sign that maybe I could have kept comedy in my life.

Keeping ‘half a foot’ in academia was maybe the reason: by graduate school, I felt all the things I enjoyed (making macarons at the local patisserie; writing fiction; caring for children) seemed to be held up as signs I ‘wasn’t a real academic’. Then there was the actual ‘comedy’ piece I wrote for Salon, in 2012, ‘How to screw up in Arabic’, which later got cited, er, in a end-of-decade-crescendo involving this little document and how it all went a little bit awry. Back in Oxford for my doctorate, I’d walk past the Wheatsheaf pub on the high street and think — whoever is there now, I hope it brings them as much happy as it once brought me.

But why not me? This might be the cliche of ‘turning 40 and no longer caring what anyone thinks’, but I think the solution to this yearning is just to, well, resume it. There’s no law stopping me (when I think back to why I stopped comedy I do also recall — I did spend a lot of my 20s in authoritarian countries where taking the piss out of the powerful got you into pretty sketchy situations). It is, thankfully, too late for me to bring something to Edinburgh this year so a room of two and a half American tourists yawning through my standup will have to wait one more week. But in the meantime I’ll be back at my old haunt from autumn, doing one of the things that has made me happiest.

Maybe I should’ve waited another year to write this to have the neat symbolism of two decades – but 2007 doesn’t feel like two decades ago, it feels like 200 years and yesterday ago. The changes are obvious in many ways: the internet was present but not all-consuming, and social media was only beginning to seep into daily life (I’m not sure how much of a flex this is, but I think I was one of the first few thousand people to join Facebook – we called it ‘the facebook’, imported to Oxford from Harvard, and thought of it as a site to pass notes in the back of class, little idea of the election-warping, brain altering behemoth it would become). Most literary conversations happened in person or on paper, in my little writing group at LMH, my spooling emails with writer-embryo friends far away; the idea of launching a novel into the world felt both intimate and mysterious, untethered from the instant feedback and public scrutiny of today. The pace of life seemed slower, and the boundaries between private and public selves were more easily maintained. Even the thrill of seeing my name in print carried a different weight, not yet diluted by the constant stream of online content and commentary. This is an easy line to tell myself, of course, but I’ve often thought of what I would have written if I’d been born ten years earlier, the same age as Zadie Smith – what books would have been written if the device on which I write was not linked up to a dystopia-playground carousel of infinite cascading entertainment and horror.

The moment I learned my novel had won a literary prize remains etched in my memory: an event under a blazing sun at LMH where my lovely then-boyfriend from my comedy group met my father for the first time then stood with me through a surreal awards ceremony. There was a rush of disbelief and elation, tinged with something deeper—an acute awareness of being seen. For a young writer, this recognition felt both thrilling and intimidating, as though the world had suddenly turned its spotlight in my direction and I’d forgotten to clean myself up properly for it (there was, in fact, an unexpected photoshoot, preserving me forever in my 2000s owl-necklaced proto-state, standing next to an impossibly handsome Tobias Hill and an impossibly exuberant Fay Weldon – two Real Grown Up Writers there, praising my little embryo-work). I remember the trembling hands, the wild pulse, and the thought that maybe, just maybe, this was the beginning of my whole life. But the news arrived amid exam revision and mounting stress, making the experience feel almost disembodied—a bright flare of joy in a fog of worry. My boyfriend and I took the champagne bottle they gave me to the university parks, got drunk and then went home to revision notes tacked to our dorm room walls.

Earlier this year, I found out Tobias Hill had passed away in 2023 – I’m not sure how I missed the news at the time, except that I now have various mechanisms in place to limit my consumption of the internet. Even aside from the fact he was devastatingly young (53, dying of an aggressive form of cancer), it felt like a sick lie that he had died – he had so many books still in him, everything about the way he wrote, in the Love of Stones and the Cryptographer, shouted out that he had a third and forth act within him. Fay Weldon had passed away the year before: I did hear of that news, staying at the time with my friend (the prolific famous writer one) in the post-covid Ukraine-invasion fog of 2022, and we reread The Life and Loves of a She-Devil in homage to Weldon’s complex, thorny brand of feminism. I thought back to the awards ceremony in 2007, dizzy in the heat outside LMH, Fay Weldon had told me that “if I kept it up I’d take my place amongst the best in the land.” This isn’t a boast, because – dear reader, I did not keep it up. Hill and Weldon’s encouragement had shaped my early sense of possibility, and knowing they were gone brought a quiet ache—a feeling of gratitude intertwined with loss, of them, and for that moment, and for that time. 2007 forever.

Being a published novelist in my early twenties was both exhilarating and bewildering; I was, mainly, very lost, as all young people are, but lost in a see-saw teetering way of being half-celebrity half-waitress (I spent the summer after the novel was published opening mail at the New Statesman as an editorial assistant, then ran away to a foreign country because I needed to be lost around people who hadn’t heard about the book). I spent much of that decade navigating a landscape of expectation, self-doubt, and occasional bursts of confidence. I felt out of place, as everyone young probably always does, uncertain about my voice and my place in the literary world, yet buoyed by the memory of that prize and the generosity of those who believed in me. I got reviewed in the Guardian and then couldn’t pay my rent. I got letters from fans and then got my heart broken. Success did not shield me from insecurity; rather, it exposed my vulnerabilities and forced me to confront my ambitions and fears head-on.

I re-read my first novel for the first time in over a decade last year. It is, mainly, complete bilge, not bildungsroman brilliance-amidst-the-youthful-angst, really just old school slop before AI made it popular. There is always the pain reading work produced long ago: if it is better than you could do now you become wistful at the passage of time, if its tripe you feel a full-body cringe that it was ever released into the world. With Psalm 119 I feel both. I’m slightly astonished, now I read it as if encountering a stranger, that it is so meticulously structured (I took the longest Psalm in the Bible, which uses each letter of the Hebrew alphabet as demarcations of verses, and mapped three stories on to it – I think the idea came to me from an exhibit in the Ashmolean of Caravaggio’s paintings, where it showed how he blocked a canvas out square by square and I thought “ok great, I’ll block a book out square by square and paint each quadrant”), and how well-read I was (although, that’s all I had done by that point in my life? Read and read and read). But none of that offsets – how stupidly young, and young and stupid, and stupid about my stupidness, and stupid about my youngness, I was when writing it, and that the grown ups in the room should probably have checked in on me instead of letting that just drift out into the world, and then leave me adrift in the aftermath. Post-MeToo I reflected on the fact I wrote a novel about a lecherous professor messing up the life of an undergraduate – while I was an undergraduate – and no-one of the twenty-years-older-than-me adults involved in the publishing process said – hey, are you ok? But I also look back and wince at how ungrateful I must have seemed to the kind publishers who took a chance on me, and I wish I could undo that.

Now, after a decade spent fearing the act of publishing, I find myself on the cusp of releasing several novels at once. The anxiety that once paralysed me has softened, mainly through time, a little through a series of concerted efforts to unpick it. The years of hiding behind drafts and unfinished manuscripts are finally giving way to a new chapter. The journey has been long and complicated, and (worst of all) hurt other people, as I spent most of the 2010s either in a revolution or war-zone or trying to figure out who I was after the 2007-LMH-moment, but – as it is all finally untangling, I feel all the stories are finally ready to be born.

At the end of the last decade, I moved to the edge of the world and I changed my name. I planned to build myself a little fort – though I had no idea, then, what avalanches awaited me. I found ‘Bifrost University’ while looking for somewhere in Iceland from which I could work on the Icelandic constitution drafting process – the country had had a constitution-writing process during the same period as the constitutions of the Arab world that I had watched warp and buckle (and drag me into the disintegration in ways from which my life will never fully un-dent). Nestled in the cracked-toothed beauty of Iceland’s west coast, the university was an emblem of Nordic learning and community spirit. Its history traces back to cooperative movement prior to Iceland’s independence, founded as an outpost for creative thinking, environmental stewardship and cultural exchange.

The apocryphal story I was told is that an Icelandic man went to Ruskin College, Oxford, and liked it so much he decided to rebuild it in Iceland’s barren and lava-strewn land. When I returned to the UK post-covid, my friend Laurie (yes the famous prolific writer one) told me the story of how William Morris had run away to Iceland to heal from heartbreak; I wish I’d known that story when I was there. The campus, set against windswept hills, Baulan mountain watching over us, and the waterfalls gurling down the valley, felt like a world apart—a place where the boundary between classroom and nature blurred into insignificance.

Living at Bifrost during the covid years was surreal. Isolation was nothing new; after all, the landscape itself was a lesson in solitude. Yet, as the pandemic swept across the globe, the sense of community took on a new significance. Lectures shifted online, corridors echoed with silence, and the usual rhythm of campus life was replaced by anxious anticipation. Despite the uncertainty, bonds formed in adversity: shared walks beneath the midnight sun, watching the aurora with our masks on, remote collaborations, and small acts of kindness made life bearable, even memorable.

I needed to return to the UK in 2021 for the necessities of covid, health and family, and – while I don’t wish to over-use the language of trauma – I experienced a series of brutalising shocks upon returning to England. The first was the disrespect for nature – I nearly vomited seeing more rubbish strewn on the side of the road than I had seen in two years in Iceland. The second was at how the ravaging of covid had layered over – or been exacerbated by – a decade of Tory austerity policies, the health services worn bare and the fabric of communities strained by the corrosive effect of the decimation of state support. The third, relatedly, was the corrosion of higher education itself. I left the UK as soon as I could after my doctorate, for reasons I won’t go into here (complete an Oxford degree and run away is a habit of mine) so hadn’t had the experiences of early career researcher life in UK institutions. Re-engaging with UK higher education as covid waned was a devastating experience for me – my friend and I started writing a sitcom called ‘University Challenged’ about the absurdities of post-Brown-report commodified college life, but my heart deeply ached for Bifrost, teaching my students as the sun rose at 11am, discussing collaborative constitution drafting as the snow fell outside, watching the death of American democracy in real time (I was giving a lecture on ‘the concept of the rule of law’ on Jan 6^th 2021, and eventually we all agreed to just sit down and watch the storming of the Capitol as a historical event), feeling that we had made a little sanctuary from the violence of the world in this tiny, improbable place in a lava field. I don’t think I will ever have such a beautiful experience in education ever again. And it is a hard feeling - that the best is over, that the height of an intensity has passed and everything from now will be only echoes - reaching my age in life has hardened me to understanding that there are fewer ‘firsts’ than in the early stage of adulthood, that I am no longer composing the first movement of the symphony and there are now more variations of earlier melodies than introductions of new notes, but it hurts to think that the alchemy I felt in Bifrost during those times will never again be replicated.

Today, Bifrost University is no longer fully there in the way it once was. The campus has changed, its centre relocated to Reykjavik, and the vibrant spirit feels dispersed. For those of us who called it home as the world fell apart, there is an undeniable feeling of wistfulness. The physical place may have faded, but its legacy remains—a mosaic of experiences, friendships, and dreams that shaped us during those strange times. I carry with me both a quiet longing for what once was, and gratitude for what continues to endure. And the hope that perhaps one day I will come close to recreating the good of that experience – as I am trying to, now, with Astralship.

Porter’s lodges are strange things, they – like Oxford colleges – shouldn’t really exist in the 21^st century, as glad as I am that I met my favourite porter through them. They demarcate a threshold – in the woke language of ‘gatekeeping’, they are literally a gate, saying ‘do not enter here’ to those outside of the bubble. Cambridge has – as in many other ways – struck me as being more healthy than Oxford in prioritising departments over colleges as the main focus of academic life; you’re there to learn after all, not be in a guild or secret society (or at least you should be). Students who got fixated on college politics, particularly in graduate school, always seemed like sad aimless creatures to me – I remember a 43 year old obsessing about who would be college student president and thinking “people your age run countries, actual real countries, get a grip”. The cloistered world, or human petri dish, cultivates the worst kind of elbowy cliquey nastiness, and the line (an unfortunately good line by a vile human) that in academia ‘the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low’ is never more true than in closed worlds where people writing books three people will read jostle with each other for their little corner in beautiful buildings that deserve better.

I spent the covid years in a field in Iceland in an astonishing set of university buildings on the edge of a lava field, where a nearby hot spring was redirected to heat our floors; it was the best experience I’d ever had in a university (and subject of a forthcoming substack). It had been set up by an Icelandic man who had gone to Ruskin college Oxford and decided to rebuild it on Iceland’s cracked and lava-strewn land. I taught environmental law to farmers and maritime law to sailors and had a lovely time. There was no porter’s lodge because the campus was open to everyone, although the reception of Hotel Bifrost, in an adjoining building was an alternative entrance where, on my first day, I turned up and confused the manager who thought I was a hotel guest.

My experience at Bifrost was such a tonic it has shaped my experience of higher education ever since. Coming back to the UK after Iceland was a very challenging experience for me, re-encountering the brutalising impact of the 2010s Tory reforms to higher education and how a decade of neglecting social and health provisions reached a crescendo just as covid hit. I had a visceral reaction as my Dad picked me up from the airport on my flight back from Iceland and drove me to Oxford in 2021, and I saw more garbage on the side of the road than I had seen in the last two years in Iceland. As I settled back into English life, I missed the tranquil Icelandic countryside and the gentle rhythm of the university life there.

At the funeral last week, I thought of how, as in Philip Pullman novels, the people who were the greatest force of good in my life in Oxford were people who weren’t anointed with prestige by the institution. But I also remembered there was another reason porter’s lodges mattered so much to me: one changed the course of my whole life.

When I was an undergraduate at Keble college, way back in those pre-MeToo, pre-woke 2000s, I found a leaflet for a competition for ‘best first novel for someone under 25’, pinged off a manuscript I had been working on for the last year, and – to my astonishment – won the competition, which led to the publication of my first novel, Psalm 119. I remember the awards ceremony for the novel, down the road at Lady Margaret Hall, where I shook the hands of the judges, Fay Weldon and Tobias Hill (it regularly haunts me to think that both these writers have since passed away); my finals were a month later. I’ve written elsewhere about how I feel about that novel now, but I’m glad the porter’s lodge opened up that world: as I’m gearing up for my new novels to come out later this year, I might not have a book launch in Oxford, but I’ll stop by the resting place of my favourite person in the city.

My fortieth year has been both transformative and steady. The world did not shift beneath my feet, nor did I wake to overnight revelation, but as much as I tried to resist cliché ‘life begins’ mottos, the last year has been marked by a solidifying and a renewed sense of focus. This psychological shift, quietly persistent under my daily routines and nightly thoughts, prompted reflection on my two decades of adulthood spent – more often than not – within university institutions: why did I learn what I learned? Why did I study what I studied? What would I study now if I were to begin this all again?

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Why the Future of Space Exploration Must Be Inclusive, Ethical, and Sustainable

As humanity stands on the threshold of a new era in space exploration, with exponential activity in both the public and private sectors, the cosmos beckons not only as a frontier of scientific discovery but also as a mirror reflecting our societal values. The choices we make now will determine whether outer space becomes a domain sustained for all, or yet another arena dominated by the interests of the few. The necessity of decolonising the cosmos and ensuring space sustainability is no longer a distant debate; it is an urgent imperative for our collective future. This is the topic of much of my forthcoming work and as such I’d like to briefly set out my position on this topic.

Throughout history, the urge to explore and expand has often been coupled with the desire to claim, control, and exploit. The colonial ventures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were marked by the assertion of power over territories and peoples under the guise of progress, from the seedy mercantile allegiances of the East India Company as handmaidens to the state, to the orchestrated deprivations documented by Mike Davies in Late Victorian Holocausts. As the ‘second generation of space exploration’ continues in its exponential increase, it is crucial to recognise that the patterns of conquest, resource extraction, and exclusion that defined terrestrial history are at very real risk being repeated beyond our planet’s bounds, enacting the same worst dynamics of imperialism to a new terrain. The cosmos offers an opportunity to chart a different course—one grounded in equity, stewardship, and shared benefit.

The Outer Space Treaty: Principles and Limitations

In 1967, at the height of the Cold War, the international community adopted the Outer Space Treaty—a landmark agreement that declared outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, as “the province of all mankind.” The Treaty enshrined the notion that space shall be free for exploration and use by all states, and explicitly prohibited national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, use, occupation, or any other means. In effect, it established space as a common good, belonging to no nation or entity.

Yet, while the Outer Space Treaty articulates noble intentions, its efficacy is increasingly called into question, including by those who championed it in earlier eras: it is simultaneously an astonishing achievement and, today, no longer fit for purpose. The absence of robust enforcement mechanisms, ambiguities in interpretation, and the rapid evolution of space technology have exposed the Treaty’s limitations. As more actors—both governmental and private—venture into space, the principle of space as a common good is often overridden by competing interests and ambitions. In particular, the ‘black hole’ (forgive the pun) of legal provisions for

Current Realities: Overriding the Common Good

Recent years have witnessed a dramatic acceleration in space activity. Nation states are establishing lunar programmes and announcing plans for Mars missions, while private enterprises are launching constellations of satellites, mining asteroids, and even selling plots of land on the Moon. The commercialisation of space, fuelled by technological advances and the promise of vast resources, has reframed space as an arena for ‘resource competition’. The first generation of space exploration may have been underpinned by the mutual goading of the USA and USSR, but there was no vying for resources, only the clout of securing ‘firsts’ to demonstrate national prowess: in the second generation of space exploration, we are dangerously close to private companies and super powers enmeshing in a dance of a scramble for resources.

This scramble for space assets and territory echoes the “scramble for Africa” and other colonial land grabs, where the race to claim and exploit outweighed considerations of justice or sustainability. In the absence of clear, enforceable rules, powerful actors are able to shape the contours of space governance, often sidelining the voices and interests of less powerful states and future generations. Without proactive intervention, the cosmos risks becoming an exclusive domain, reinforcing the inequities and excesses of our colonial past.

Imperialist Excesses: Lessons from History

The legacy of imperialism is not merely a matter of historical record; it is a living reality that continues to shape global inequalities. Colonial ventures were marked by the extraction of resources, environmental degradation, cultural erasure, and the marginalisation of indigenous peoples. The justification of these practices often rested on the rhetoric of civilisation and progress, masking the profound harms inflicted on societies and ecosystems.

Applying these lessons to space, it is evident that unchecked expansion and exploitation could repeat these patterns on a cosmic scale. The rush to extract lunar minerals or establish private colonies, for instance, could create new forms of exclusion and environmental harm. By failing to learn from history, we risk exporting the very systems of domination and unsustainability that have proved so damaging on Earth.

Why Decolonising the Cosmos Matters

‘Decolonising the cosmos’ is an ethical, social, and environmental necessity. Ethically, it demands that we recognise the rights and interests of all humanity—including those yet unborn—in shaping the future of space. Socially, it requires inclusive governance structures that give voice to all nations, particularly those historically marginalised or excluded from space ventures. Environmentally, it calls for stewardship of celestial bodies, recognising that the fragile ecosystems of space are not immune to harm.

Moreover, decolonising space challenges the narratives of inevitability and entitlement that have pervaded historical expansion. It asks us to imagine new models of cooperation, shared benefit, and responsibility, rather than replicating the competitive logics of the past. In doing so, it offers a pathway to a more just and sustainable future—on Earth and beyond.

Space Sustainability: Definition, Importance, and Challenges

Space sustainability refers to the ability to maintain the long-term health and accessibility of the space environment for current and future generations. This encompasses not only the mitigation of physical threats, such as space debris and orbital congestion, but also the preservation of legal and ethical standards that ensure equitable access and use.

The proliferation of satellites and spacecraft increases the risk of collisions and the creation of debris, which could render orbits unusable and jeopardise critical services on Earth. The unchecked exploitation of resources could exhaust or irreparably damage celestial environments. The absence of inclusive governance could entrench inequalities and foster conflict, undermining the very spirit of space as a global commons.

Achieving space sustainability requires overcoming significant challenges, such as developing and enforcing international norms, balancing commercial interests with the public good, and integrating the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. It also demands humility and foresight, recognising that our actions today will shape the possibilities of tomorrow.

Steps Towards Inclusive and Sustainable Space Ventures

To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, the international community must take proactive measures to decolonise and sustain the cosmos. First, the principles of the Outer Space Treaty should be reaffirmed and strengthened, with clearer mechanisms for enforcement and dispute resolution. International bodies should be empowered to regulate activities such as resource extraction, orbital traffic, and environmental protection, ensuring that all states have a voice in decision-making.

Second, the participation of the Global South, indigenous groups, and civil society in space governance must be prioritised. This means creating platforms for meaningful consultation and collaboration, and ensuring that the benefits of space exploration are shared equitably. Efforts to diversify the space sector—educationally, economically, and culturally—are essential for building an inclusive future.

Third, sustainability must be embedded in all space ventures, from mission design to end-of-life planning. This includes investing in technologies for debris removal, adopting responsible practices for resource use, and conducting rigorous environmental assessments before any activity is undertaken. Transparency, accountability, and international cooperation are key to ensuring that space remains safe and accessible for all.

The cosmos offers humanity a chance to reimagine our relationship with the unknown—not as conquerors, but as stewards and collaborators. Decolonising space and ensuring its sustainability is not simply a matter of policy, but a test of our collective imagination and moral resolve. By learning from our imperia past, reaffirming space as a common good, and acting proactively to prevent imperialist repetition, we can forge a future in which the benefits of space are truly sustained for all.

Astralship is a space and an idea. Between Angelsey and the foothills of Snowdonia, in a constellation of places in north Wales embroidered with Hebrew names (Deniolen, Bathesda, En-Gedi — I felt like I was back in another life as we wove through the lush green village lanes and passed names I’d last encountered in a very different context), a converted deconsecrated church that has, since its owner bought it in 2010, served various functions for humane tech communities and as a space for retreats, and is now entering a new chapter. Liam, Astralship’s founder, has a wonderfully dynamic way of thinking that reminds me of my engineer father’s brain, and has devised uses of the space of Astralship into ‘voyages’.

I’m moving here and I couldn’t be more excited. Here’s my profile on their website: Heather Allansdottir

My voyages will be :

-the voyage of the constitutions

-the voyage of the stars

-the voyage within

I will be working on a number of podcasts and online courses, and writing about my time there. Iceland is also becoming a bigger part of my life again — which is the subject of my next post.

One thing that was quite a knot to untie in my mind as I explored Astralship and its environs over a long weekend last week is the fact the landscape and area was very familiar to me — during my pre-teens in Runcorn in Cheshire (before my family moved down south and I got middle-classified and Oxbridge-shaped by Hills Road…) we’d spend half terms and bank holidays in nearby Machynthleth or Llandudno, where my sisters and I “invented” a sport called ‘bracken rolling’ where we’d hug each other and tumble down the hills safely cushioned by bracken. I am conscious of the history of ‘English tourists’ and also Merseyside/Liverpool in particular with the flooding of Capel Celyn. In a strange serendipity, I’d actually begun learning Welsh on an app about six months before I learned of Astralship, and then just as I came back from Wales, my favourite app Drops released Welsh (and Greenlandic!).

On which note — I’m going to resume my “language learning experiment” videos. It’s so surreal watching back these videos (eg Heather Allansdottir - resources for learning Icelandic) a fossil of covid limbo, where we were all continuing to live and create and at the same time in strange stasis (my stasis including being on the miracle-island of Iceland and yet full of heartache for my loved ones far away). I’ll focus on Welsh, Greelandic and Nordic languages, but very keen to expand it beyond that too. This will dovetail with a project on Tolkien which I’ve been keeping under wraps for quite some time… on which more soon…

Also - my favourite word in any language is ‘geimfari’ - the Icelandic word for ‘astronaut’. So now I’m off to find out how to say ‘astronaut’ in Welsh…

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