This is not a librarians’ UFO conference. It’s not about whipping ET’s ass.

What the Cambodian Librarians Association’s January webinar tells us about the shifting geography of ideas in an era of satellite-dependent knowledge – and why the global library and publishing establishment should be paying attention.

NOTE: This post was written just before the January event, which with bitter irony I missed due to an undersea cable disruption. Resurfacing it now in its original form.

On 22–23 January 2026, the Cambodian Librarians Association (CLA) will convene a Global Webinar Forum that, on the face of it, looked like dozens of other professional development events that populate the library calendar.

There are sessions on AI literacy, physical space planning, and information diplomacy. All eminently sensible topics for a professional association trying to keep its members relevant in a rapidly changing world.

But tucked into the programme – and to my mind the most significant thing about the event – is a headline session titled ‘How to Fight and Win Space War’, to be delivered by Paul Szymanski, a space warfare theorist with five decades of experience advising the US Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines.

Szymanski is not a keynote speaker who typically finds himself on a library conference agenda. He publishes books with titles like The Battle Beyond: Fighting and Winning the Coming War in Space. He has spent his career mapping orbital escalation ladders and developing algorithms for satellite attack assessment.

His presence at a Cambodian library webinar is, to put it diplomatically, unusual. And that unusualness deserves considerably more scrutiny than a brief event preview affords.

The Space Infrastructure Argument: Why This Is Not Science Fiction

Let us be absolutely clear about what the CLA is attempting by including this session. This is not, as some western commentators might suggest, a librarians’ UFO conference. It is a serious – and bold – attempt to position library and information services within a geopolitical conversation about the future of knowledge infrastructure.

I’m anticipating that the argument the CLA will implicitly be making will go something like this: modern library and information services depend on satellite-enabled connectivity. GPS timing underpins financial transactions and critical infrastructure globally.

This is not a theoretical concern.

Starlink and competing low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellations have become the de facto internet backbone for millions of users, including in under-served regions across Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. An attack on satellite infrastructure – cyber, electronic, or kinetic – would not merely disrupt navigation or military communications. It would degrade or destroy the digital information ecosystem that libraries, publishers, and knowledge institutions increasingly depend upon.

This is not a theoretical concern. The 2022 cyber attack on ViaSat’s KA-SAT network at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – which disrupted satellite broadband across Europe – demonstrated that space-based information infrastructure is a legitimate theatre of conflict.

The US Senate is currently considering the Satellite Cybersecurity Act of 2025, which would establish a commercial satellite cybersecurity clearinghouse precisely because policymakers now treat orbital systems as critical infrastructure comparable to power grids

Industry analysts project more than 100,000 satellites in orbit within a decade. The question of what happens to information access if even a fraction of that constellation is compromised is entirely legitimate – and largely unasked by the library and publishing professions.

By inviting Szymanski, the CLA was, in effect, asking that question publicly. Whatever one thinks of the framing, it is a more intellectually adventurous move than another panel on metadata standards or collection development budgets.

Library Diplomacy as Strategic Positioning

The programme does not stop at space warfare theory. Dr Hayat Ahmad of CEPT University is listed to speak on ‘Library Diplomacy & Trusted Info’, exploring how libraries maintain information integrity in an AI-saturated environment. This pairing – space security alongside information diplomacy – is not accidental. It reflects a coherent, if ambitious, institutional argument.

The concept of library diplomacy, while not new, has gained renewed currency as information environments become contested terrain. IFLA, the global federation of library associations, has long engaged with UNESCO and UN bodies on freedom of information and the right to access knowledge. But IFLA’s framing tends toward the broadly humanistic: access, equity, intellectual freedom.

What the CLA programme gestures toward is something different – a more explicitly securitised framing, in which libraries are not just custodians of the cultural commons but stakeholders in the resilience of national and regional information infrastructure.

This is a significant conceptual shift. It moves libraries from the soft-power register – trusted institutions that build civil society – into a harder register adjacent to critical infrastructure policy. Whether the profession is ready to inhabit that framing, or whether it even should, is a conversation worth having. The CLA has, perhaps inadvertently, started it.

Are Other Associations Having This Conversation?

The short answer is: not really. Not like this. (I’ll be happy to be proved wrong, if someone knows better.)

IFLA’s 2025 World Library and Information Congress, held in Dublin, included sessions on AI literacy, digital equity, advocacy, and disaster preparedness. The theme ‘Uniting Knowledge, Building the Future’ is the kind of broad, aspirational framing that IFLA does well. But a search of the programme for anything resembling orbital conflict, satellite security, or space infrastructure comes up empty.

The association is focused, rightly, on pressing issues of misinformation, AI governance, and open access – but these are largely framed as content and access challenges, not infrastructure resilience challenges.

ALA, CILIP, and similar national bodies are likewise engaged with AI literacy and workforce transformation, and of course there is genuinely important work being done – the review literature on library associations and AI published through IFLA’s repository shows a sophisticated, six-year trajectory of engagement with machine learning ethics, competency frameworks, and generative AI guidance. But the upstream question – what happens to all of this if the satellite layer goes dark – is simply not on the agenda.

This is a significant blind spot, and one with a particular irony: it is precisely the profession’s success in advocating for digital access and digital literacy that creates the dependency it is not discussing. Every rural library that now relies on satellite broadband to provide internet access is, whether it knows it or not, exposed to the orbital risk environment. Every publisher whose distribution model depends on cloud infrastructure routed through satellite-served regions shares that exposure.

Would I want to be dependent for connection with the outside world on an individual this volatile?

Here in The Gambia I’m dependent on an aging submarine cable for reliable internet, and when the government here started talks with StarLink I was at first excited at the prospect, but then stepped back to view the bigger picture, and I’m grateful the authorities are dragging their feet.

As a science and astronomy lover I cannot help but love what Elon Musk is doing in this field, but even leaving aside his politics, and just looking at the continuing issues surrounding Grok, I have to ask, would I want to be dependent for connection with the outside world on an individual this volatile?

But the debate being initiated by the CLA is. I am anticipating, not about one man, but about space security per se. Not from an invasion by marauding Martians, but from Earth-based rivals. At which point, let’s remind ourselves that the CLA is, yes, the Cambodian Librarians Association. And here is where things get genuinely interesting for anyone in the west who follows ASEAN publishing and information ecosystems (I can’t be the only one, surely!).

Why Cambodia? The Geopolitical Subtext

Let’s be frank here. Cambodia is not, by most measures, a country that western publishing professionals have strong professional relationships with, or indeed could locate confidently on a map without assistance. Its publishing sector is still developing. Its library infrastructure, while improving, faces significant resource constraints.

The CLA is not the ALA or CILIP; it does not have the institutional weight to set agendas for the global profession.

And yet here it is, hosting a two-day global webinar on space warfare and library diplomacy, with a genuinely international speaker list that includes American defence researchers and Indian academics alongside the more predictable AI literacy specialists.

Cambodia’s geopolitical position makes this more, not less, significant. The country has navigated the Sino-American competition in Southeast Asia with a pragmatism that frequently draws western criticism. It is generally understood to sit closer to Beijing than to Washington on most regional issues – it famously blocked ASEAN consensus statements on the South China Sea in 2012 and 2016.

At the same time, it maintains what analysts at 9DashLine describe as a ‘multi-vector’ diplomatic strategy, maintaining a Strategic Partnership with Japan and seeking development relationships across multiple power centres. The new Hun Manet government, successor to his father Hun Sen, has signalled an interest in burnishing Cambodia’s international credentials across multiple domains.

Not merely a professional development initiative.

Against that backdrop, a Cambodian professional association convening a global forum on space security and information infrastructure reads not merely as a professional development initiative. It reads as a soft-power signal – a demonstration of Cambodia’s capacity to convene international expertise on strategically significant topics, and to position the country’s professional institutions as credible participants in high-stakes global conversations.

This is precisely how soft power works at the institutional level, as Chatham House has noted in the ASEAN context more broadly: seemingly non-political platforms – tourism forums, academic conferences, professional associations – become vehicles for building relationships and projecting competence. The CLA forum, whether its organisers frame it in these terms or not, is functioning within that logic.

The ASEAN Information Landscape and What It Tells Us

For those of us who cover ASEAN publishing, the CLA event sits within a broader pattern of Southeast Asian institutions attempting to leapfrog the western professional establishment by engaging with next-stage questions before the establishment itself has got there.

The region’s satellite connectivity story is instructive. In countries like Cambodia, Myanmar, and parts of Indonesia and the Philippines, satellite internet – Starlink, OneWeb, and regional competitors – is not an edge case or a supplement to robust terrestrial infrastructure. It is, in many areas, the primary access pathway.

The stakes of orbital disruption are not abstract policy questions.

The stakes of orbital disruption are therefore not abstract policy questions; they are lived realities for communities that depend on satellite-enabled connectivity for education, commerce, and civic participation.

ASEAN as a bloc has been actively developing cybersecurity frameworks and, more recently, broader information and communications technology resilience strategies, with the ASEAN Regional Forum’s Working Group on Security of Information and Communications Technologies providing a multilateral coordination mechanism. But this work largely happens at the government and security establishment level. Professional associations – libraries, publishers, archives – are not typically at that table.

The CLA’s gambit is, to my mind, to argue that they should be. It is a bold claim, and the profession has not yet earned the right to make it in every jurisdiction. But the underlying argument – that information professionals have a stake in the resilience of the infrastructure their services depend upon – is sound.

What This Means for Publishers

The publishing industry has its own exposure to this landscape, and it is largely having the same non-conversation that libraries are having. Cloud-dependent distribution, AI-assisted editorial workflows, and the increasing role of satellite connectivity in reaching global markets all create dependencies on the same orbital infrastructure that Szymanski and his colleagues study.

Publishers in the Global North who are beginning to think seriously about market development in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and similar regions, will encounter a connectivity landscape that looks very different from European or North American norms.

Satellite broadband is not a backup option in many of these markets; it is the infrastructure. The question of what happens to digital publishing distribution – and to the educational publishing sector that serves schools in satellite-connected communities – in the event of orbital conflict or major satellite infrastructure disruption is not one that appears in any publishing industry risk register that I’ve ever encountered.

This is a gap. The library profession, through the CLA’s webinar, has inadvertently flagged it. Kudos!

The Bigger Picture: A Profession Redefining Itself

Step back from the specifics – the Cambodian context, the space warfare expert, the ASEAN geopolitics – and what you see is a small professional association making an argument about relevance that the global library establishment has been struggling to make for two decades.

Libraries have long justified their existence by reference to access, equity, and the preservation of human knowledge. These are genuine and enduring values. But in a world where access is increasingly a function of infrastructure – and infrastructure is increasingly contested – the argument needs to go further.

The CLA’s webinar programme, unless I’m completely misreading this, will gesture toward what that further argument might look like: libraries as stakeholders in information resilience, as institutions with a professional interest in the security and sustainability of the knowledge infrastructure on which they depend.

Plenty enough to be dealing with without thinking about whipping ET’s ass

Whether IFLA, ALA, CILIP, and the Chartered Institute of Publishing will pick up that thread is another question. The evidence from 2025’s professional conference calendars suggests they are not yet inclined to. There is important work happening on AI governance, digital equity, and open access. Plenty enough to be dealing with without thinking about whipping ET’s ass.

But this is no joking matter. The hard infrastructure questions – orbital security, satellite dependency, the implications of space conflict for information access – remain, for now, the province of a small association in a country most western publishing folk struggle to locate.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsletter.