Mélusine Lebret, a Youth Fusion intern, recently sat down with Almudena Azcárate Ortega, from the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. Almudena is the research assistant for the Space Security Program, as well as for the Weapons of Mass Destruction & Other Strategic Weapons Program, at UNIDIR.

In our chat with Almudena, we covered topics from her backgrounds to the current state of the research on outer space security and the actions that are being taken to pursue the disarmament movement in orbit and beyond. We began with a discussion around UNIDIR’s mission in outer space security, the most difficult space norms it aims at tackling and how its achievements help question the 1967 Outer Space Treaty for the better. As the conversation led to analyzing the effects of counter space acts on the militarisation of space, we focused on the breakthroughs UNIDIR’s Space Dossiers had on the subject.