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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.

Like childhood, thinking critically about militarism can entail a great deal of unlearning before coming to a more nuanced understanding of what lies beyond the signifier. Just as childhoods are multiple, overlapping, contingent, and bound up in many more aspects of our social worlds than is apparent if we look only for the child, so too militarism. The ways in which militarisms intersect childhoods and vice versa, therefore, call us to reflect not only on the conspicuous presence of militaries as institutions or on life in zones of conflict, but on the everyday lives of children everywhere in all their complexity and diversity.

Taking its main cues from Critical Security Studies, this chapter asks some unconventional questions about somewhat unconventional subjects for a field that has traditionally been more inclined to centre states in its investigations. In so doing, it brings to light the concealed political commitments that are a part of any attempt to theorize security and which fix arbitrary limits on whom and what gets foregrounded in the security stories told. Placing particular emphasis on recovering agency and political subjecthood, one can see the crucial part played by other actors in both the everyday practices of security and it has come to be defined. One can better appreciate both the problems and promise of one’s own roles in producing security—and insecurity—in the ways it is approached, as students and scholars.

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...

Childhoods intersect peace and conflict in myriad ways, though renderings of children in these contexts are all too often reduced to one of two dominant, if quite distinct, framings: hapless victims or child soldiers.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

In a much-cited 1997 contribution to the New Internationalist, moral philosopher Peter Singer described a thought experiment posed to his students in which he asked them to imagine that, along their route to the university, they happened upon a child drowning in a shallow pond.

Among the conceptual challenges that new thinking about children and childhood raises for International Relations is how to reconcile subjecthood and (in)security. While the rise of resilience as a paradigmatic alternative to security holds promise for the recovery and foregrounding of subject positions too easily occluded by simplistic renderings of victimhood, it has drawn criticism for downloading the responsibility to abide onto those affected by adverse circumstances. Worse, it risks erasure of trauma in its tendency toward valorization of individualized triumph over adversity, one implication of which is that bona fide subjecthood is somehow earned through indomitability to overcome hardship, deprivation, and even violence. Though problematic in all cases, this may appear especially so when it comes to children, whose disempowerment makes them uniquely vulnerable. Exploring the challenge this poses for International Relations, the central argument of this chapter is that there is a need to hold security and resilience mutually in tension whilst keeping children’s subjecthood and vulnerability both conspicuously foregrounded.

This poststructuralist chapter explores some unconventional questions about somewhat unconventional subjects for Security Studies, a field that has traditionally been more inclined to focus on states in its investigations. In particular, it examines concepts such as ‘acting subject(s)’, which concerns who or what is acting to produce security or insecurity; ‘agency’, which refers to the capacity to act; ‘subjecthood’, which suggests mastery of one’s own agency or the idea that actions are products of one’s autonomous choices; and referent object(s), which are whom or what we seek to make secure. The chapter also discusses ‘smart’ bombs and other advanced weapons of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that moved into popular consciousness beginning with the 1991 Gulf War. Finally, it considers the role of children and Indigenous peoples both in security discourse and actual security practices.

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 ...

Days after the December 1890 US Army massacre of Lakota refugees at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, commercial photographer George Trager photographed the Army burial detail as they cleared the site and committed the dead to a mass grave. Widely circulated as post-cards, Trager's photographs merged with a broader colonial narrative, allegorically and cathartically sketching a heroic account of a dire confrontation between `civilization' and `savagery'. Reconfirming dominant ideas about an inherently dangerous foe, the Wounded Knee photos worked through colonial imaginaries in ways that reinforced a Euro-American monopoly on legitimacy in war. More recently, widely circulated photos of abuse of prisoners by US soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib Prison have effected a disruption of the operant war narrative. Whereas Trager's photographs worked to sustain stable definitions of moral `civilization' and `savage' depravity, those from Abu Ghraib have undermined the legitimacy of US conduct in Iraq. In this article, I consider these differing effects with reference to photographic composition and the popular functions of allegory and catharsis.

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...

This chapter explores some unconventional questions about somewhat unconventional subjects for Security Studies, a field that has traditionally been more inclined to focus on states in its investigations. In particular, it examines concepts such as ‘acting subject(s)’, which concerns who or what is acting to produce security or insecurity; ‘agency’, which refers to the capacity to act; ‘subjecthood’, which suggests mastery of one’s own agency or the idea that actions are products of one’s autonomous choices; and referent object(s), which are whom or what we seek to make secure. The chapter also discusses ‘smart’ bombs and other advanced weapons of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that moved into popular consciousness beginning with the 1991 Gulf War. Finally, it considers the role of children and Indigenous peoples both in security discourse and actual security practices.

At least since the 1991 Gulf War, considerable talk of a revolution in military affairs (RMA) has been excited by the advent of precision-guided munitions (PGMs), themselves widely credited with having changed the nature of warfare. To be sure, so-called ‘smart bombs’ and associated marvels of (principally US) military technology mark a watershed, but it is one that turns as much on the deployment of rhetoric as on PGMs themselves. In particular, concomitant rhetorical appeals to ‘costless’ war and meaningful discrimination between combatants and non-combatants are recasting the bases of legitimacy in warfare. However, the techno-fetishism of much of the prevailing discourse on the RMA, overly preoccupied with the capabilities of the weapons themselves, has come at the expense of as full an appreciation of the important senses in which some of the most revolutionary changes currently underway speak more to issues of legitimacy and the social depth of warfare.

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 recent years we have seen increasing reflection among scholars of security studies regarding the boundaries of their field and the range of its appropriate subject matter. At the same time, scholars elsewhere in the academy have been developing their own approaches to issues of security. These various pockets of work have been undertaken in nearly complete isolation from one another and with little apparent awareness of relevant developments in the other fields. In this essay, we advance the claim that security cannot be satisfactorily theorized within the confines of disciplinary boundaries—any disciplinary boundaries. The challenge thus becomes how to develop what might be termed a “supradisciplinary” approach to the study of security that will allow us to think and engage our subject matter across a range of discourses without giving rise to an interdisciplinary hybrid or sui generis discipline.

Much has been made in recent years of the remarkable technological advances driving what has been described as the latest Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Typically, however, a disproportionate emphasis on the astounding capabilities of new military hardware has come at the expense of investigations into the socio-political consequences of the transformation of warfare presently underway. Reflection upon the less neglected social aspects of previous RMAs is instructive, suggesting that technological determinism does not yield reliable accounts of the most important implications of new military technologies. In light of this, a historically informed reconsideration of prevailing assessments of the nature and significance of the current RMA seems in order. In particular, rapidly evolving attitudes toward discrimination between combatants and non-combatants in warfare are in need of consideration, as these have traditionally been bound up with watershed military innovation. Implicated in the reversal of a trend toward greater tolerance of indiscriminacy, the advent of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) increasingly bears directly on perceptions of legitimacy in the conduct of war. In this context, unequal access to PGMs suggests unequal legitimate recourse to war measures, and this might well turn out to be the most important implication of the RMA to which we are witness.

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 ...

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...

This discussion departs from the traditional “interview” in structure and content. The field, like much of society at large, has become fragmented and isolated. Therefore, this discussion was structured in such a way that encouraged a generative conversation in which we could come together and talk about our work differently. This discussion is not an explicit comparative inquiry into the methods of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy and Narrative Therapy. Those readers interested in differences or similarities between an “exception” and a “unique outcome” may risk disappointment. The purpose of the interview was to engage in a critical reflection that would not be methodology focused, but, instead provide the reader with a glimpse of the people themselves and what it is they are trying to accomplish through their work. The purpose was also to encourage discussion between all of us, instead of a linear question-and-answer process. The structure of the discussion was also influenced by a frutuitous event that ...

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.

Perhaps more than any other area of academic inquiry, disciplinary International Relations is deeply invested in the project of understanding historical and contemporary diplomatic practices both in themselves and as grist for the conceptual mill. It seems somewhat counterintuitive, then, that Indigenous diplomacies would not figure prominently in International Relations, even if only as a counterpoint to the state-centrism of conventional treatments of diplomacy that seldom exceed the narrow confines of foreign policy analysis. And yet, the field has been almost completely silent on Indigenous peoples, their diplomacies, and the distinctly non-Western cosmologies that underwrite and enable them. An interesting and important development in recent years, however, has been the emergence of a small body of literature inquiring into precisely this silence. While some of these prefatory engagements have been made on matters of empirical interest, most have sought to glean some sort of conceptual insight from particular Indigenous knowledges or ways of knowing. Promising to unsettle hegemonic state-centric renderings of politics and the international, the latter offerings have been welcomed by a range of critical voices that have long decried the field’s rigid statism, its tightly bounded subject matter, and its exceedingly parochial conceptual terrain.

This book has, since its inception, been haunted by three conflicting propositions: that it possibly cannot, perhaps should not, and yet must be written. Each in its turn, these three frets speak to the issues to be taken up in this chapter and the next. As to the first, competency in the area of ethnographic research and writing methods was clearly requisite, but disciplinary International Relations has little to offer in this regard, making it impossible to proceed without a considerable investment of time and effort to become acquainted with the vast literatures on ethnography generated by (principally) anthropologists and sociologists. Second, and related to this, are the myriad ethical issues that unavoidably attach to any project involving ethnographic representation—particularly when undertaken from a position of privilege relative to those (re)presented. This has, quite rightly, given considerable pause to deliberate upon the moral quandaries that have been my constant companions throughout. But it does not necessarily follow from these daunting challenges and disquieting perils that the project cannot or should not be pursued. On the contrary, ethical dilemmas are not averted by respecting the disciplinary boundaries that have both isolated International Relations scholars from important debates about ethnographic research methods and simultaneously underwritten their inattention to Indigenous peoples.