‘Emailed applications are preferred’: ethical practices in mine action and the idea of global civil society

Abstract

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 equal participation in its transnational networks, then, the global civil society rhetoric of the larger mine action movement may ring rather hollow. It is argued that this circumstance poses a serious challenge not only to ethical practices in mine action but to the notion of global civil society as well.