Beyond the Karman line: Macron brings International Space Summit to Paris

There are moments when the choice of a city carries almost as much meaning as the subject being discussed.

Paris will host the International Space Summit on Sept. 9 and 10 under the initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron, bringing together actors concerned not merely with reaching space, but also with ensuring that humanity’s expanding presence beyond Earth continues to serve humanity, other species and the planet in a peaceful and impactful way.

France is an especially fitting convenor. The International Astronomical Union is headquartered in Paris, while at Le Bourget the Musee de l’Air et de l’Espace preserves the human journey from aviation to aerospace. Macron also revived the spirit of international peace in Paris in 2018 by launching the Paris Peace Forum, 100 after the Armistice of 1918.

The forum created a contemporary, non-partisan platform wider than many conventional international gatherings. Governments and international organizations meet academia, business, civil society, foundations, researchers, cultural actors, advocates and practitioners. Discussions move vertically, from community experience to senior decision-making, and horizontally across subjects ranging from peacebuilding and public policy to culture, education, technology, critical minerals, sustainability and the arts.

This is why I have long regarded the Paris Peace Forum as something approaching a Davos for peace and international cooperation. Its greatest potential legacy may be its ability to mature beyond any single presidency and remain an enduring, non-partisan space where different sectors, regions and generations can test ideas together.

The International Space Summit is a separate initiative, but it reflects the same timely conviction. Increasingly complex challenges cannot be understood from one discipline, institution or level of society alone.

Saudi Arabia and France know something about building such bridges. Their relationship extends across investment, science, education, archaeology, heritage, culture, the arts, gastronomy, sport and, increasingly, space. Both societies also demonstrate that international engagement need not mean cultural homogenization. Internationalization at its best allows nations to take part confidently in the world while carrying their own history, traditions and aesthetic language with them.

A bridge is valuable precisely because its two shores remain distinct.

Saudi Arabia has also developed an increasingly important convening role around the sustainability of the space environment through recurring international gatherings on space debris and orbital sustainability. These meetings bring together space agencies, researchers, academia, industry and other stakeholders to examine one of the most immediate collective challenges facing the long-term use of orbit.

Their significance extends far beyond engineering. Orbital debris is a question of access, responsibility and stewardship. What one actor leaves in orbit may endanger many others, while congestion can affect communications, navigation, Earth observation, climate research and disaster response.

This Saudi emphasis on stewardship is particularly relevant to any future Karman Convention or complementary international framework for outer space. It reflects the same principle underlying the International Space Summit in Paris. Science, policy, research and industry must work across sectors to ensure that space continues to serve humanity, other species and the planet in a peaceful and impactful way.

My own work has long centered thematically on international development, multilateralism and peacebuilding. Geographically, it has increasingly moved toward extreme environments, particularly the polar regions, the deep ocean and outer space.

These are not identical legal domains, but each offers lessons in cooperation. The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 remains in force more than a century later, with Saudi Arabia among its parties today. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 demonstrated that nations with profound differences could nevertheless preserve an entire continent for peaceful purposes and scientific investigation.

On Nov. 2, 2001, UNESCO adopted the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, recognizing that human memory does not cease to deserve protection because it lies beneath the sea.

That principle should now travel upward.

The moon may increasingly be understood as what I have come to call a fourth pole. I use the term deliberately. Much renewed lunar attention is concentrated on its south polar region, where permanently shadowed areas may contain water ice and where several current and planned missions are directing scientific interest.

Like Earth’s poles, the moon is remote, scientifically valuable and increasingly important. It therefore raises a familiar question. How can exploration remain compatible with stewardship, cooperation, cultural heritage and responsibility?

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty remains indispensable, including its prohibition on national appropriation and its provisions making states responsible for national space activities, including those undertaken by nongovernmental entities. Yet it was written before today’s commercial space economy, contemporary lunar ambitions and emerging questions surrounding resources and heritage.

Perhaps the coming decades will require something complementary, whether a Karman Convention or another multilateral framework addressing scientific cooperation, cultural heritage, responsible resource activity, stewardship and peaceful use.

Human history offers an appropriate metaphor.

The Berlin Wall once divided Europe and today teaches reconciliation. The Great Wall of China, once defensive infrastructure, is now UNESCO World Heritage and a setting for cultural encounter. At-Turaif in Diriyah, with its monumental mud-brick architecture and fortifications, likewise allows Saudi Arabia to share its history with the world. Great Zimbabwe’s stone walls testify to an extraordinary African civilization. Cartagena de Indias preserves fortifications transformed into shared heritage. Across Oceania, Nan Madol preserves the memory of a sophisticated Pacific society.

Walls can begin as instruments of separation and become places of encounter.

Antarctica offers an even more powerful image. Many travelers reaching the continent by sea must first cross the Drake Passage, the formidable body of water between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. The crossing often takes about 48 hours.

It is not literally a wall. It is a threshold.

Beyond it lies perhaps the world’s most remarkable continent of peaceful scientific cooperation, where researchers from many nations work in the same extreme environment to produce knowledge that serves humanity, other species and the planet in a peaceful and impactful way.

The Karman line should carry the same meaning.

At about 100 km above Earth, it marks the conventional boundary between atmosphere and outer space. Like the Drake Passage, it should not become a wall that separates us, but a threshold that connects us, between Earth and space, national achievement and shared responsibility, inherited heritage and heritage not yet created.

Education and training are not peripheral to peacebuilding. They are among its most durable instruments. When I was mandated in 2019 to establish and lead a peacebuilding unit in Saudi Arabia, one of the first lessons I drew from the experience was that peace cannot be taught through a single discipline. Over about 14 months, the unit convened workshops with international and national partners, and trained more than 80 participants drawn from 16 sectors. I deliberately sought broad participation across generations and genders, with women representing about 40 percent of participants and young people forming a substantial majority. In practice, this was one way of translating into training the principles embodied in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, and Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace and Security.

The experience reinforced a conviction that has stayed with me ever since. Contemporary peacebuilding requires deep expertise, but also systems thinking. A practitioner may need to understand disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, security and justice-sector reform, governance, economic recovery, reconciliation, psychosocial healing, education and institutional design, while recognizing that no single framework can simply be imposed on every context.

This became the foundation of the Peacebuilding Canvas I later developed as a way of thinking across interconnected systems rather than isolated interventions. The same lesson applies to space. As our challenges become more complex, academia, training institutions and nonprofit organizations must remain independent, nonpartisan contributors to public knowledge, capable of bringing disciplines together and preparing people not merely to operate within systems, but to understand how those systems interact.

That is why education should remain central to any serious conversation about peaceful and impactful cooperation in space.

This is also why Strasbourg matters. Situated in eastern France at one of Europe’s historic crossroads, it has become a symbol of reconciliation and has educated generations of international, interdisciplinary and intercultural space professionals.

Where circumstances permit, I hope its international space-education presence can be reassessed and renewed as a principal headquarters, complemented eventually by regional hubs across continents. Such a network could deepen exchange with emerging regional institutions, including the African Space Agency, while enabling regions to learn from one another without becoming replicas of one another.

Education, research and space cooperation should ultimately serve humanity, other species and the planet in a peaceful and impactful way.

President Macron deserves recognition for convening this conversation now.

Recently, while observing the solar eclipse of August 2026 in Argenteuil, France, I found myself reflecting on the moment darkness met light. For a brief interval, the moon crossed the sun, not to extinguish its light, but almost to reveal it differently, allowing darkness itself to illuminate what we so often take for granted.

I wondered what celestial experiences, landscapes and forms of heritage we are receiving today that future generations may no longer encounter in the same way.

Perhaps that is one of the responsibilities of education, science and peacebuilding. Not merely to inherit knowledge, but to preserve the conditions under which others may continue discovering it. Not merely to advance, but to ask what should accompany advancement. Not merely to reach new frontiers, but to ensure that those frontiers remain places where knowledge can serve humanity, other species and the planet in a peaceful and impactful way.

France is providing the table. Saudi Arabia, France and the wider international community have much to contribute around it.

And beyond the Karman line, the question remains beautifully simple.

Not only how humanity reaches space, but how humanity chooses to behave once we get there.

That choice may ultimately determine something greater than the future of space exploration. It may determine whether humanity carries its oldest divisions beyond Earth, or whether, for once, a new frontier becomes an opportunity to leave some of them behind.

The eclipse reminded me that darkness and light need not always be understood as opposites. Sometimes one allows us to perceive the other more clearly.

Perhaps the same can be true of boundaries.

The Drake Passage does not prevent us from reaching a continent devoted to peaceful scientific cooperation. The Karman line need not divide Earth from space. And the walls humanity has inherited need not dictate the walls it builds next.

If the coming era of space exploration is to become one of our greatest achievements, its measure should not be distance alone.

It should be whether, beyond the Karman line, we remain capable of meeting one another with curiosity rather than conquest, stewardship rather than possession, and the wisdom to understand that the farther humanity travels, the more important it becomes to remember that we traveled there together.

— Abeer Al-Saud specializes in multilateral engagement, cultural diplomacy and peacebuilding through a systems-thinking lens. She was the first Arab selected for the Explorers Club 50 (2025), and is a Club of Rome member, Karman Project fellow and expert member of the World Economic Forum.