Aeropeace in airspace:  from defensive measures to positive peace

Peace can no longer be imagined without a peaceful sky – without ‘Aeropeace’ – but what does that entail?

Marking the conclusion of the five-year RegulAIR project (RegulAIR: The Integration of Drones in the Norwegian and European Airspaces), funded by the Research Council of Norway, this commentary explores a fundamental shift in the stakes of drone regulation and the political importance and urgency surrounding this shift.  In 2025, the regulatory future of European civil airspace is intrinsically linked to the continent's geopolitical security, the evolving understanding of hybrid warfare, and, from the perspective of Europe’s citizens, what it means to be safe. My argument here is that this regulatory future is less about civil aviation and more about peace and democracy, requiring conceptual attention to and multistakeholder conversations about the relationship between peace and airspace.

I began writing this commentary in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I was attending a multi-day workshop alongside young and mostly exiled dissidents, journalists, and activists, mostly from Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. For these activists, security problems and Visa troubles are familiar challenges. This time, many participants, including myself, arrived late, and some could not attend at all after flights were diverted from Vilnius due to airspace restrictions. I ended up in nearby Kaunas when Vilnius airport suddenly closed due to balloons coming in from Belarus. While not dangerous, this incident was disruptive and unsettling, and it made me reflect on how essential a peaceful airspace is to everyday life.

Academic discussions regarding the importance of airspace for peace and war (including aerial warfare and asymmetric warfare in airspace, attacks against aircraft in peacetime, concerns about sovereignty and intrusions in national airspace, and  ‘peace enforcement’ by airpower) have given little conceptual attention to airspace.  Current attempts to deal with (and analyze) the situation are defensive and national security-oriented. No sustained effort has been made, either in the past or the present, to conceptualize an idea of a peaceful airspace linked to societal peace and to human security. To that end, I propose the concept of ‘Aeropeace’ as a new, key objective for civil airspace regulation.

From commercial drone airspace to a new threat landscape

Originally, the RegulAIR project was motivated by an interest in accelerating the rate of technological progress and proliferation of drones, and strategies of stakeholders pushing for the establishment of a viable commercial drone airspace. Back in 2020, RegulAIR was envisioned largely as a project that would track the slow but steady regularization and reconceptualization of civil airspace as a marketplace, a form of critical infrastructure, and as a logistics and supply chain mechanism.

We expected aerial corridors to support viable drone commerce. We expected the materialization of a workable legal framework dealing with safety, security, ethics, and surveillance, as well as the competency requirements and responsibilities of drone pilots and operators. From a domestic perspective, the challenge was twofold: implementing national law in line with the European Union's regulations on common rules in the field of civil aviation (2018) and integrating drones into Norwegian airspace in harmony with EU legislation. The pace was slow but steady.

Starting with the Ukraine war in 2022, things have not quite turned out according to our expectations. In the context of the big transformation of European security and defense, the regulatory landscape of drones is in flux. Moreover, the regulatory efforts specific to drones have faced challenges in harmonizing with other EU regulations, most notably in the field of AI.

According to research on vertical geopolitics, drones expand our conceptualization of space from two dimensions to three.  Drones themselves are understood as socio-technical assemblages of the sky and vertical space. Security must be geared not only towards securing ground territory but, focusing on height and depth, on securing ‘the volume’.  This suggests that in 2025, public security is inevitably airspace and drone-related – and that the same applies for how we think about human security and societal peace: the airspace must be considered.

From Dronewar 1.0 to 2.0: an emergent aerial Public common?

Beginning around 2002, the ‘original’ Dronewar 1.0 was waged with Predators and Reapers. Two decades later, with the advent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dronewar 2.0 entails the use of smaller weaponized drones on an unprecedented scale.  With the key difference that Russia is waging an illegal war and Ukraine is waging self-defense, both countries have successfully leveraged small and medium-sized drones against military and civilian infrastructure and for individual targeting. In the midst of conflict, Ukraine has become a significant producer and exporter of armed drones, characterized by rapid cycles of innovation, an ongoing push towards greater automation, and live testing in the theater of war. From the perspective of international human rights and humanitarian law, as well as the ethics of war, many aspects of these R&D processes, deployments, and their impact are problematic.

My focus is on a different dimension of Dronewar 2.0. I suggest that the proliferation of armed drones results in three parallel developments: it reconfigures lower civil airspace not only as a site of public order and national security,  but also as a site of public safety and human security, and as a public common fundamental to everyday, societal peace. The implications are significant. Simply put, peace can no longer be imagined without a peaceful sky – without ‘Aeropeace’ – but what does that entail? To begin to define this concept, I examine Aeropeace through three perspectives: defensive responses, negative peace, and positive peace.

Defensive responses: Evolving European aerial insecurity

There is an ongoing securitization of the cluttering of civil airspace. Going back to my own experience, balloons over Vilnius is nothing new –  proliferating in the skies for touristic and sometimes romantic (apparently a good place to go on a date)  or illicit (smuggling is a longstanding practice) purposes and has, until recently, not been perceived as threatening.   After 4 closures in a week, ballooning romance is likely no longer permissible, and what has been perceived as a cross-border crime is, in the words of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission, now considered a hybrid attack. This understanding was reiterated by my fellow workshop participants, who kept referring to the balloon incursions as ‘hybrid war.’ While the example is anecdotal, it illustrates how aerial security is becoming a societal concern – not in terms of safety-in-the-skies but with respect to perceptions of safety-on-the-ground. In this case, the messiness of the airspace also increases due to the messiness and vagueness of the concept of hybrid warfare.

While drone disruptions are a decade-old problem, systematic drone disruptions at scale are new. In 2025, there has been a sharp uptick across Europe of reported drone sightings near airports. As reported, drone sightings have become ‘more disruptive and likely to shutter airports for hours at a time’, leading to delays, diversions, and cancellations, and severely disrupting European air traffic. Not only have these disruptions become more common, but they have also triggered much more serious rhetoric and policy responses.

A prominent narrative is that the West must find better ways to defend its skies against incursions. To support Denmark after multiple incidents, the UK air force dispatched a counter-drone unit. Belgium later enlisted such units from France and Germany, and Great Britain, to track down and seize drones.  As problems of criminality are reconstituted as national security threats, counter-drone systems become key defense assets. Among propositions for better responses are radars, anti-drone artillery, interceptor missiles attached to drones  (‘interception drones’), and defensive ‘drone walls’. A drone wall is a network of sensors, electronic warfare equipment, and weapons aimed at detecting, tracking, and neutralizing drones. Rather than a single ‘European dome,’ a drone wall is made up of a range of national systems.

While these measures could mitigate the drone threat, they come with a cost: they are part of a militarized response to the drone threat, whereby the lower airspace becomes a theatre of hybrid war and where the line between defensive and offensive operations easily becomes blurred.

The limited politics of negative Aeropeace

In its classical sense, negative peace refers to the absence of violence and disruption, achieved either through settlement or deterrence. However, as currently framed by European political and defense actors – given the lack of an agreement to end the war in Ukraine – what emerges is a securitized form of negative peace. With respect to drone airspace, I suggest that a negative peace concept rests on three objectives:

• Preventing jamming and cyberattacks on air traffic systems (ground attacks against civilian aircraft and terrorism incidents fall outside the scope of this scenario).
• Preventing illegal incursions into civilian airspace by any airborne vehicles, including planes, drones, balloons, and airships, etc.
• Preventing armed drone attacks targeting territory, infrastructure, soldiers, or civilians.

Furthermore, a possible solution to the drone problem could be to get rid of drones in civil airspace altogether: While hosting several important EU meetings, as part of its rotating presidency of the Council of Europe, Denmark closed its entire airspace to civilian drones for five days. The island where the arctic city of Tromsø is located has a permanent drone ban, and Oslo had a temporary drone ban for the Norway-Israel World Cup qualifying match in October 2025.

While such a ban may declutter airspace,  it does not hinder hostile incursions by drones or other aircraft. Similar to the objectives outlined earlier, a ban does little to address the broader challenge of understanding what airspace means for societal, positive peace. To sum up the overall argument: To eliminate threats and violence, establishing the conditions for negative peace in the airspace is necessary – but to see Aeropeace through the lens of negative peace offers only a partial understanding. What is needed is a deeper understanding of what airspace is to public safety and human security – and a better conversation about how it can be protected not through force but through democratic mechanisms.

Positive Aeropeace: dimensions, objectives, and mechanisms

Positive peace is about embedding peace into societal structures through social justice and inclusion, robust democratic institutions, economic fairness, and sustainability. To begin thinking about positive Aeropeace,  we must identify the dimensions of such peace, its objectives, and the mechanisms for achieving them.

In terms of dimensions, I propose that a positive peace approach conceptualizes airspace as a public common – a shared resource for all. While global commons, such as the (fracturing) outer space, are defined as being beyond sovereign jurisdiction, the idea of public commons emphasizes the role of national authorities and voters in deliberating the future of lower civil airspace. Complementing this is the principle that safety and security must be enjoyed by everyone as a public good. Safety is public safety and security is human security. In this conceptualization, safety and security cannot be a zero-sum game where governments disadvantage some communities to protect others. Feeling safe is different from not being afraid – and requires trust and pathways for accountability. It is the public, through elections and other procedures for public participation, which must identify and define the objectives of a positive Aeropeace.

Moving forward

As a novel concept, Aeropeace draws attention to emerging threat vectors,  evolving ideas of the role of peace in civilian airspace, and the very question of what constitutes peace up there, above our heads, in the sky. I argue that defensive measures or strategies aimed at achieving negative peace are insufficient. Yet, current expert analysis mostly does not go beyond insecurity and the need for stronger defensive approaches. Even as negative Aeropeace has received little attention, I contend that peace researchers and critical security studies scholars must engage in more robust thinking to define the dimensions, objectives, and mechanisms of a positive Aeropeace.

Circling back to the erstwhile ambitions of RegulAIR, a positive Aeropeace does not rule out a commercially viable drone airspace. However, as the public experiences risk and harm linked to lower airspace, the conditions for regulation, along with popular expectations regarding trust and governance, have shifted. Communities increasingly strongly associate their sense of security and safety with what happens in the airspace above their heads. The reconstitution of lower airspace as a public commons where public safety and human security are key entails a growing expectation that commercial drone airspace will be shaped through democratic processes, backed by strong accountability mechanisms, and oriented towards the public good. Finally, this commentary is intended as an invitation to all stakeholders: let’s discuss!

I am grateful to Cedric de Coning, Samar Nawaz, Thor Olav Iversen, and Bruno Martins for comments.

• Kristin Bergtora Sandvik is a Professor at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo and Research Professor at PRIO