Broadening the Ban: Limitations of Agency, Intentionality, and Legitimacy in the Ottawa Convention

This paper aims to contribute to a critical understanding of the implications of the Ottawa Convention through an assessment of the ways in which agency, intentionality, and legitimacy are woven into the discourse surrounding the ban treaty. It is hoped that through a problematisation of the discursive and conceptual limitations of the Ottawa Convention, the agenda and targets of the ban might at the very least be broadened to include other categories of weapons that perform and devastate in the same ways as AP landmines. At best, it is hoped that this paper will stimulate critical thinking about militarisation and state-centric security practices more generally, and will call into question those particular underlying norms that give rise to discursive constructions of states and state interests, militaries, and weapons usage as unproblematically ‘necessary.’