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Since 2011, the McMaster Children and Youth University has offered free monthly lectures on the campus of McMaster University. Though aimed at children and youth aged seven to fourteen, there are n...

A critical challenge for human rights and human security alike turns on diminution of subject audibility and voice and the reduction of rights-bearing subjects to mere referent objects of security....

In March of 2017, officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security publicly acknowledged a proposed policy of forced separation of unauthorized migrant children from their parents. Conceived as a deterrent to other families that might yet contemplate crossing the U.S. southern border, the proposal sought to formalize and expand on similar practices of deterrence already implemented on a more ad hoc basis. By way of a brief examination of the internal logics and implications of deterrence thinking in this context and more broadly, fundamental incompatibilities with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child are revealed. Although the U.S. has not ratified the Convention, I argue that it is nonetheless beholden to a robust and binding customary norm of international law obliging all states to respect its key provisions, including rights that would prohibit the separation of children from their parents as a preemptive measure to deter unauthorized migration.

The spectre of lethal autonomous weapons has drawn increasing interest and concern in recent years as advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have signaled their potential immanence. Long ...

Children and childhoods have not garnered much attention from either mainstream or critical currents of scholarship in International Relations and Security Studies, notwithstanding the significant ways in which they may be inseparable from the fields’ subject matters, core concepts, and ideas. Addressing this omission is not a matter of simply ‘bringing children in,’ however. Rather, it necessitates first coming to terms with how children are already present both as global political actors and as expressed through deeply held ideational commitments that enable and sustain our understandings of and engagements with security. At the same time, this is a presence that has only ever been partial inasmuch as the children and youth of the field’s imagining are not imbued with full and unqualified political subjecthood. Recovering robust subjecthood and a more nuanced understanding of lived childhoods promises, among other things, important theoretical correctives and more sophisticated conceptualization of emer...

The bases of legitimacy in recourse to war have, in recent years, come to turn vitally on meaningful discrimination between combatants and noncombatants. Concurrently, the remarkable successes of the movement to ban antipersonnel landmines and the follow-on ban on cluster munitions have likewise been predicated on this same arbiter of legitimacy, marking specific kinds of weapons as bad for their inherent indiscriminacy. This article begins by exploring sources of popular expectations that make official claims to discriminacy seem plausible. In particular, the role of popular representation is considered for its foregrounding of the technological feats of precision-guided munitions in ways that mystify ethico-political questions about their use. It is argued that this, more than any objective properties of weapons themselves, has been the truly revolutionary aspect of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The implications of/in this for/by disarmament advocacy of the sort exemplified in the ...

Since the early‐1990s, Indigenous voices in global politics have been growing in strength, in numbers, and in their demonstrated ability to affect outcomes on a range of important issues. The latter, in particular, marks something of a triumph, following as it does on a long history of often‐outright refusal by states to take seriously and engage Indigenous diplomacies. It is argued here that the change attends a palpable shift from what can be described as “Indigenous Globalism” to “Global Indigenism”. All of this is of great interest to Canada, where a number of important treaty‐related issues have been before the courts in recent years, and where the long‐awaited 1997 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples called for a restructured relationship between Canada and its First Nations, to be founded upon recognition of Aboriginal nationhood. This article explores foreign policy implications of these developments in light of Canada's recent decision to vote against adoption of the United Natio...

On 13 June 2002, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty officially passed into history, removing the most significant legal obstacle to American development and eventual deployment of active ...

The 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the use, stockpiling and production of anti-personnel landmines has been widely hailed as a triumph of an emergent global civil society—a claim that has done much to underwrite the legitimacy of the ban, efforts to extend it and ongoing mine action more generally. Transcending limitations of space, a watershed aspect of the mine ban movement was its use of new information and communications technologies to forge a transnational activist network and raise a global groundswell of popular sentiment pushing states to accede to the ban. While the centrality of civil society actors to this process is beyond dispute, the idea that the campaign is appropriately regarded as an initiative of global civil society may not as easily withstand scrutiny. It is precisely in many of the world's most mine-affected areas, for example, that access to email and the Internet can least be taken for granted. To the extent that majority populations in these locales are effectively excluded from ...

Since September 11, 2001, questions regarding how to protect the United States, Canada and their allies from attack have caused a resurgence in the debate regarding the US National Missile Defence (NMD) program, or variations on it. In an attempt to elucidate the primary arguments in the debate, CFP convened a virtual forum of academics, from across the country, to respond to the opening arguments of one of NMD's strongest Canadian proponents, Dr. James Fergusson of the University of Manitoba. Included in the dialogue were: Prof. Douglas Ross of Simon Fraser University; Prof. Ann Denholm Crosby of York University; Prof. J. Marshall Beier of McMaster University; and Prof. Frank Harvey of Dalhousie University. Their two‐round debate covered, inter alia, American motives, global implications, the rationality of rogue states, the effectiveness of ballistic missile defences, alliance repercussions and Canada‐US relations.

The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti‐Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, generally portrayed as a practical application of the emerging discourse on “human security,” has been widely hailed as a triumph of an emerging global civil society, transcendent of the particularistic interests of states in the international system. Questions remain, however, as to whether the Convention represents significant changes in state understandings of what constitutes security and for whom, and whether elements of an emergent global civil society acted as agents of that change or served as a conduit through which broader military, political and economic forces could find new ways to realize old interests. From within a ‘human security” perspective, these questions are explored with regard to the interests involved in implementing the four pillars of the Convention ‐ the ban on the use of anti‐personnel landmines, the ban on their production, the obligation to dem...