UNIDIR opens a two-day space security conference as PAROS talks stall

The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research opened its 2026 Outer Space Security Conference at 10 a.m. Geneva time on 8 September in Room VIII of the Palais des Nations. Director Robin Geiss gave the welcome. Izumi Nakamitsu, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, gave the keynote. The meeting runs through 9 September, in the room and online.

UNIDIR framed the two days as a working session, not a commemoration. The institute's note said space is in a phase of faster innovation, sharper competition and deeper civilian dependence, and that those three facts raise questions about stability in orbit. The agenda is built to force those questions onto named officials rather than onto a final communiqué.

Monday's four blocks

Panel I, Mapping space threats and consequences, sits first. Anca Agachi of RAND, Natalia Fuzhenkova of the Russian mission in Geneva, Sebastiano Fulci of the Italian foreign ministry and Olavo de Oliveira Bittencourt Neto of the Catholic University of Santos are listed. Almudena Azcárate Ortega of UNIDIR and the Secure World Foundation moderates. The brief for the panel is the grey zone between a close approach that is routine and a close approach that is a threat, and the way an incident in orbit lands on Earth.

Panel II after lunch is Strategic stability and the security of space architecture. Dmitry Stefanovich of the Primakov Institute, Nivedita Raju of SIPRI, James Acton of Carnegie, Yue Yuan of China Foreign Affairs University and Husham Ahmed of Pakistan's Geneva mission are on the list. Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation chairs. The point of that mix is to put nuclear-policy voices and space-policy voices in the same hour, because early-warning and command links now run through satellites that were not designed as nuclear furniture.

A mid-afternoon Vienna exchange brings Rosanna Diem-Hoffmann of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs and Fatima Salem Al Shamsi, chair of the UN Expert Group on Space Situational Awareness. That session is the bridge to the legal shops in Vienna that do not always talk to the disarmament shops in Geneva.

Panel III closes the first day: Taking stock of efforts to advance the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space in all its aspects. Emilia Sidorova of the Russian foreign ministry, Marjolijn van Deelen, the EU's special envoy for space, the chair of the open-ended working group on PAROS, listed as Ambassador Foradori, Clive Hughes of the UK Foreign Office and Ambassador Li Chijiang of China are named. Peter Martinez of the Secure World Foundation moderates. PAROS has been a Geneva phrase for decades. The panel exists because the legally binding track and the voluntary-norms track still do not agree on what an armed race in orbit looks like.

Tuesday's three blocks

Day two opens with a youth-campaign video and then Panel IV on a multi-actor orbit. Cassandra Steer of the Australasian Centre for Space Governance, Vasily Gudnov of Roscosmos, Bin Li of the University of Newcastle, Jessica Tok of the US Office of the Secretary of War's space-policy shop and Arlette Tanga of the African Association of Air and Space Law are listed. Jessica West of CIGI and Project Ploughshares chairs. The US speaker's office title is the one that will be read twice in the room. It places a Pentagon space-policy official on a UNIDIR panel next to Roscosmos.

Panel V is monitoring, verification and visibility. Joanna Ruiter of the Netherlands Space Agency, Areg Danagoulian of MIT, Regina Peldszus of the European External Action Service, Thomas González Roberts of Georgia Tech and Juan Carlos Dolado Perez of Look Up Space are named. Bruno Martini of UNIDIR chairs. The brief cites more than 24,000 objects in orbit and asks whether space situational awareness can verify an agreement rather than only track junk.

Panel VI is data and ICT infrastructure: Patricia Cooper of Constellation Advisory, Floyd D'Costa of Space Armour, Karryl Kim Trajano of RSIS in Singapore and Laetitia Cesari of UNIDIR. Thando Mathe of UNIDIR chairs. Two youth winners, Ali Shan and Joel Pajiah, have lightning slots. Geiss closes the meeting at 17.00.

What the guest list is for

Conferences of this type often end with a chair's summary that no capital treats as a text. The value on 8 and 9 September is the seating plan. Russia, China, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Italy, Pakistan, India-linked scholarship, African space law and commercial SSA firms are on the same two-day grid. That is rarer than the panel titles suggest.

PAROS remains the political test. If Foradori's working group, Li, Sidorova and van Deelen can name a single next document they would all sign, the conference will have done more than fill Room VIII. If they cannot, the rest of the agenda still leaves a record of who is willing to sit with whom while the objects overhead keep multiplying.