Constituting Omar Khadr: Cultural Racism, Childhood, and Citizenship

Abstract

Until 2012, Omar Khadr was both the only former child soldier and Western national left in Guantanamo Bay. Captured by US forces at the age of 15, this Canadian youth would spend more than 40% of his life in US custody during the War on Terror. This article advances two key arguments. First, as a child soldier, Khadr is simultaneously cast as an object of sympathy and suspicion. The construction of Khadr's childhood is animated by a cultural racism, which casts Khadr as both a victim of an extremist family and the evil outcome of a “jihadi” upbringing. Second, this article examines competing culturally racialized claims about citizenship, prompted by the failure of the Canadian government to seek Khadr's repatriation. While the central preoccupation of liberal citizenship discourse is the erosion of Canada's identity as a Western, liberal democracy, “racial‐nationalist” discourse raises the alarm on the threat posed by “citizens of convenience” who must be cast out of the polity through practices of “pure exclusion.”

Taxing Away Citizenship: Do American-Canadian Dual Citizens Consider Their Status to be an Inconvenience?

“…"Citizenship of convenience" has garnered much attention in the Canadian media (Park 2014;Nyers 2010). Dual citizens have been discursively cast, in the media, as 'citizens of convenience,' as individuals who hold thin affective ties to Canada and instead rely on this citizenship for instrumental reasons.…”

Observing Youth Punishment in the Social Systems of Law and Education

“…A lot of research focuses on youth because they are exploited, oppressed, objects of fear mongering, and generally (politically) demonized (Hogeveen 2007, Hogeveen and Freistadt 2012, Hogeveen 2005, Giroux 2009, 2008b. It can be said that children are crafted as innocent and evil (Park 2014), but as Giroux (2009, 28) explains, the latter part may take priority as young people are no longer valued for their potential to become contributing citizens in a democratic nation, but instead:…”