Dangerous Terrain: Re-Reading the Landmines Ban through the Social Worlds of the RMA

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 civil society campaign to ban landmines are weighed.