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Avoidance of civilian casualties increasingly affects the political calculus of legitimacy in armed conflict. “Collateral damage” is a problem that can be managed through the material production of precision, but it is also the case that precision is a problem managed through the cultural production of collateral damage. Bearing decisively on popular perceptions of ethical conduct in recourse to political violence, childhood is an important site of meaning-making in this process. In pop culture, news dispatches, and social media, children, as quintessential innocents, figure prominently where the dire human consequences of imprecision are depicted. Children thus affect the practical “precision” of even the most advanced weapons, perhaps precluding a strike for their presence, potentially coloring it with their corpses. But who count as children, how, when, where, and why are not at all settled questions. Drawing insights from what the 2015 film, Eye in the Sky, reveals about a key social technology of governance we have already internalized, I explore how childhood is itself a terrain of engagement in the (un)making of precision.

In the days and weeks following the March 2020 World Health Organization declaration of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a number of national leaders in the Global North, all of them working under unprecedented and extraordinarily challenging circumstances, took time to directly address the children of their respective countries. Besides answering questions about the crisis put to them by their youngest citizens, a recurrent theme on these occasions was the imperative role of children in helping to arrest the spread of the pathogen. Recalling how children have been similarly engaged in other moments of emergency, the overtures made in the context of COVID-19 are instructive both as to the recognition of children as bona fide, effectual, and necessary social agents as well as to the limits of acceptance of their subjecthood, revealed as they are in circumstances of exception.

Unsettling dominant narratives as well as the authority of voice of the credentialed ‘expert,’ critical pedagogies have always been disruptive. But, as we are increasingly called to acknowledge, what many might regard as the healthy skepticism of reflexive critical scrutiny or a commitment to the contingent and constructed nature of social life has darker analogues in what at times seems the wholesale abandonment of reliable ‘truth’ or knowledge claims. Once the stock-in-trade of internet trolls, ‘alternative facts’—as US presidential counselor and erstwhile Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway blithely termed them—openly ‘inform’ public discourse and, in turn, move the boundaries of political possibility. Rightly alarmed at these developments, a rising chorus in the academy urgently recommends a retreat from the world of indeterminate knowledge claims wrought from myriad critical interventions of recent decades. But though the fears behind this are well-founded, renewing faith in (or perhaps longing for) stable truths is to trade one chimera for another. Moreover, it misses the point that much more at issue than truths, per se, are regulatory practices of knowledge production and validation. Critical approaches have much to offer by way of a corrective here if taken together with a collegial ‘ethos’ in teaching and learning.

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.

Whether in the rhetorical strategies of the campaign to ban landlines, appeals for famine relief, or the present historical apex of mass refugee migration, deployed images of abject childhood are central to the visual economies of humanitarian crisis. As the quintessential innocents deemed in need of protection, children are constructed outside of meaningful subjecthood and objectified as the evocative ‘scenery’ of the politics of protection. As such, children’s place in these visual economies together with their relative voicelessness are particularly revealing of how the concept of protection is beset by a paradox it cannot resolve: simultaneously imperative in consequence of diminished political subjecthood and itself demeaning of that same subjecthood. Tracing the problematique of children’s agency and subjecthood through the un Convention on the Rights of the Child and applicable aspects of legal regimes in Canada both beholden to the Convention and charged with care and protection of children, this article offers insights relevant to but perhaps less immediately apparent in the context of the R2P regarding the tricky and fraught intersections of childhood, subjecthood, and protection.

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 ...

In the mid-1990s, a unique confluence of activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and governments, unprecedented in the history of arms control, took shape as an international movement to ban antipersonnel (AP) landmines. Widely hailed as a triumph of an emergent global civil society, this hitherto unlikely coalition managed in only a few years to first stigmatize AP landmines as a humanitarian scourge and, ultimately, to parlay this re-presentation into a broadly respected ban backed with the force of an international treaty. (1) Since then, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL)--a coordinating body through which the mobilizations of NGOs and activists are focused--has continued to work both together with and independent of interested governments to extend the ban and to monitor its implementation. The successes and continuing resonance of the campaign owe much to the generation and propagation of a taboo regarding AP landmines. At the beginning of the 1990s, even Canada, eventually amon g the most strident advocates of a ban, was dismissive of the suggestion that militaries would, should, or could give up their AP landmine stockpiles. But less than a decade later, these once unexceptional weapons, in widespread use for more than a century as "force multipliers" in war and as "sentinels" or deterrents in peacetime, had become so thoroughly stigmatized that states that had declined to accede to the Ottawa Convention were increasingly defensive about their intransigence. Though neither the weapons themselves nor their more insidious effects had changed appreciably, they had been reconstructed in the public mind as a humanitarian scourge. This discursive watershed, perhaps even more so than the key players themselves, is central to a full understanding of the successes of the movement to ban AP landmines, its limitations, and some uncomfortable implications of its rhetorical devices. Pivotal to the rendering of an AP landmine taboo was the characterization of mines as indiscriminate--that is, the nature of the weapon, designed to lie in wait until triggered by an unsuspecting victim, is such that civilian populations are as vulnerable as combatants, and often more so. By itself this is ample reason to think that the world would be better off without AP landmines. The pursuit of a universal ban, however, left no room for deference to context; the mines themselves were cast as the site(s) of indiscriminacy in case it should otherwise be imagined that they might be employed without ill effect in some instances. To foreclose the possibility of any such notion, AP landmines have been rendered as a humanitarian scourge in an objective sense independent of context. This powerful rhetorical move precludes thinking about ways in which the indiscriminacy attributed to them might be attenuated in order to preserve some measure of legitimacy regarding their use. It thus lends well to the view that a universal ban is requisite, but it accomplishes this by way of an anthropomorphic turn that, as we shall see, imbues AP landmines with agency. The academic literature on the movement to ban AP landmines is limited. There has been one edited volume (2) and a handful of journal articles. (3) Scattered mentions can also be found embedded in works dealing principally with other issues. In what follows, I hope to stimulate further reflection on the siting of indiscriminacy in rhetorical efforts to extend and, conversely, to resist the AP landmines ban. I consider the issue of agency as brought into focus in assessing whether India might be bound under customary international law to accede to the ban. This is a good vantage point inasmuch as the idea of a binding customary norm turns vitally on the degree to which the central validity claims of the AP landmines taboo can be said to have been accepted by India. Moreover, this case is instructive in light of India's own rhetorical machinations, by dint of which it has sought to have restrictions imposed on the use of AP landmines while preserving certain exemptions for itself - a justificatory feat made wo rkable only by a repositioning of the site of agency. …

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...

In its various manifestations, the campaign to end child soldiering has brought graphic images of militarized children to popular consciousness in recent years. In little more than a decade, this NGO-led movement has made significant strides in terms of educating and spreading awareness amongst global publics as well as contributing to the formulation and implementation of international legal instruments prohibiting the use of children in war. The London-based Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, an umbrella organization of NGOs that came together in 1998 to focus their various efforts opposing recruitment of children for armed conflict, has established a highly effective and coherent program of advocacy with global reach. Besides its important contributions to research—periodically producing comprehensive and voluminous Global Reports1 in addition to other publications on more focused themes—the Coalition fulfills a vital monitoring role and has been active in the creation and subsequent implementation of the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, expanding the scope of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It is perhaps unavoidable that working on a volume like this one should occasion some reflection on the militarization of one’s own childhood. For my part, this reaches back initially, and most obviously, to the first explicitly militarized toys I recall having had as a preschooler: a bag of plastic, green “Army Men” that came with a pair of blue-grey Jeeps. I have vivid memories of playing with them on the kitchen floor and in the garden, and of how I valued them not only for what I read as expressions of something I took to be “great” and “heroic,” but also for the social currency I understood them to encode: the older boys in the neighborhood—old enough to have started school already—all seemed to have them, and it was important to me that I be seen to have them too. By the time my younger brother got the first and only G.I. Joe “action figure” we had in our home, I had grown more discerning about historical detail and, along with my closest friends in third grade, was beginning to combine a fascination with books on the history of war—signed out from our elementary school library—with a love of building scale models of tanks, warplanes, battleships, and the like. I had other interests too, of course, some of which were themselves militarized in important ways, even if less explicitly so. But for several years, and despite my parents’ gentle efforts to guide my curiosities elsewhere, I was very impressed by, and increasingly knowledgeable about, all things military.

Among the more enduring oversights and omissions of international relations is its near total neglect of Indigenous peoples.1 In particular, the First Nations of the Americas, ensconced within advanced colonial states, have been accorded almost no attention.2 Critical reflection upon the sources of this lapse gives rise to some important insights into the concealed commitments that underwrite mainstream international relations theory and exert considerable authority in defining and delimiting disciplinary problems, prospects, and possibilities. The origins of these conceptual predispositions and of the neglect of Indigenous peoples can be traced to the travelogues of the first Europeans in the Americas, the enduring influence of which in social contractarian thought recommends their treatment as foundational texts of the social sciences. This view highlights the relevance for international relations of challenges raised against the veracity of these formative ethnographical accounts inasmuch as such re-evaluations simultaneously call into serious question some of the most fundamental ontological commitments of orthodox international theory – commitments which have their conceptual origins in the travelogues. Significantly, the neglect of Indigenous peoples is inseparable from the not inconsiderable conceptual indebtedness of orthodox international theory to these earliest writings about the peoples of the Americas. To the extent that the accounts and claims contained therein are not sustainable in the face of challenges brought against them in critical anthropological literature and cannot be reconciled with autoethnographical accounts of the peoples whose lifeways they purport to document, then, realist-inspired international relations theory becomes identifiable as an advanced colonial practice for perpetuating the erasures they effect.