constituting omar khadr: cultural racism, childhood, and citizenship

Constituting Omar Khadr: Cultural Racism,Childhood, and Citizenship

Augustine S. J. Park

Carleton University

Until 2012, Omar Khadr was both the only former child soldier andWestern national left in Guantanamo Bay. Captured by US forces at theage of 15, this Canadian youth would spend more than 40% of his lifein US custody during the War on Terror. This article advances two keyarguments. First, as a child soldier, Khadr is simultaneously cast as anobject of sympathy and suspicion. The construction of Khadr’s child-hood is animated by a cultural racism, which casts Khadr as both avictim of an extremist family and the evil outcome of a “jihadi” upbring-ing. Second, this article examines competing culturally racialized claimsabout citizenship, prompted by the failure of the Canadian governmentto seek Khadr’s repatriation. While the central preoccupation of liberalcitizenship discourse is the erosion of Canada’s identity as a Western,liberal democracy, “racial-nationalist” discourse raises the alarm on thethreat posed by “citizens of convenience” who must be cast out of thepolity through practices of “pure exclusion.”

In a bombed out compound near the Afghan village of Abu Ykhiel, on July 27,2002, the day when US Sergeant F.C. Christopher Speer was fatally wounded tothe head by a grenade, Omar Khadr, a Canadian 15-year-old, was shot twice inthe back by a soldier who would later be identified only as “OC-1.” In a witnessreport from the Criminal Investigative Task Force,1 accidentally released by theGuantanamo Bay authorities, OC-1 explains that airstrikes were called in afterthe occupants of this suspected al-Qaeda compound refused to surrender. OC-1and Sergeant Speer, as part of an assault team, moved into the compoundthrough an opening created by the bombing raids. It was OC-1 who would wit-ness the airborne grenade believed to have ultimately killed Sergeant Speer. Itwas also OC-1, the only witness to “close-in portions of the firefight,” who wouldcome upon two males: one man lying next to an AK-47 who he shot in the head,and the boy, Omar Khadr. Without seeing who threw the grenade that wouldtake Sergeant Speer’s life, OC-1 “‘felt’ that it had not been the person who hadfired the rifle shots and concluded therefore that it had been Khadr” (AmnestyInternational 2008:10–11).Taken into custody, Khadr would spend several months at the American air-

base in Bagram, where he was tortured, before his transfer to Guantanamo Bay(GTMO). At GTMO, Khadr was subjected to further torture and cruel andhumiliating treatment during the long wait for his trial for the murder ofSergeant Speer, along with other charges of attempted murder, aiding the

1A redacted version of this report is available from WikiSources. Available at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/OC-1_CITF_witness_report. (Accessed March 11, 2013.)

Park, Augustine S. J. (2014) Constituting Omar Khadr: Cultural Racism, Childhood, and Citizenship. InternationalPolitical Sociology, doi: 10.1111/ips.12039� 2014 International Studies Association

International Political Sociology (2014) 8, 43–62

enemy and conspiracy (Case of Omar Khadr n.d.:1). Despite longstanding asser-tions of his innocence, in October 2010, at age 23 and after more than eightyears in US custody, Omar Khadr agreed to a bargain which exchanged a guiltyplea for the possibility of repatriation to Canada for the remainder of hissentence (following one final year in GTMO).2 In an unsworn statement, heapologized to the widow of Sergeant Speer, saying “I’m really, really sorry for thepain I caused you and your family” and “I wish I could do something thatwould take away your pain” (CBC News 2010). However, his lawyer insists thatKhadr is innocent, the admission of guilt merely deliverance from the nightmareof Guantanamo. This article, however, is not concerned with Khadr’s guilt orinnocence, although there is reason enough for circumspection over Khadr’sconfessed culpability.3

While several hundred individuals have been detained at GTMO, what hasdrawn attention to Khadr’s case are three unique dimensions: First, accordingto international customary legal standards, Khadr was a child at the time of thecrimes over which a plea bargain was struck and was thus a “child soldier.” Sec-ond, Khadr’s entire nuclear family—described as an “al-Qaeda family”—hasbeen the subject of sensationalism and vilification in the Canadian media.Third, as a Canadian citizen, Khadr was the only Western national whosegovernment did not intervene to ensure his repatriation from Guantanamo;indeed, the Canadian government was stalwart in its refusal to request hisreturn, advancing a discourse of non-interference in US justice processes (Globeand Mail 2009:A16). These three particularities point to the ways in whichKhadr’s case holds broad social and political significance as a site of contempo-rary ambivalence in relation to racialized young people and racialized citizen-ship within fiercely contested claims about Canada’s national identity andbelonging. These disputes are defined by cultural racism,4 a modality of racismin which a static and caricatured concept of “culture” comes to stand in for“race” and which naturalizes and essentializes cultural identity, while positingcultural difference as an inevitable source of conflict. In other words, interpret-ing Khadr’s as an exemplary case, this paper advances the claim that culturalracism structures public constructions of both racialized childhood and racial-ized citizenship. At the intersection of the two, the citizenship of racializedyoung people is limited by a logic of protectionism or negated through “thelogic of pure exclusion” (Hage 2006).The first part of this argument examines Khadr as a child soldier, simulta-

neously cast as an object of sympathy and suspicion, reflecting the dyadic socialconstruction of children as both innocent and evil. Rooted in the logic of child-hood as a perpetual condition of becoming, the construction of Khadr’s child-hood is animated by cultural racism that casts Khadr as both a victim of anextremist family and the evil outcome of a “jihadi” upbringing. The second partof this argument examines competing, culturally racialized claims about citizen-ship prompted by the failure of the Canadian government to seek Khadr’s repa-triation. In this regard, while liberalism offers a strategic defense of Khadr’srights by asserting Khadr’s right to protection as a citizen, the central preoccupa-tion of liberal discourse is the erosion of Canada’s identity as a Western, liberaldemocracy. In contrast, racial-nationalist discourse raises the alarm on the threat

2See diplomatic notes exchanged between the US Department of State and the Embassy of Canada. Available athttp://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/archive/00978/Read_diplomatic_mem_978462a.pdf. (Accessed March 11,2013.)

3Khadr’s defense lawyer claims that there is evidence to demonstrate that Speer was killed by friendly fire andthat Khadr, lying under debris, would have been unable to throw the grenade. The prosecutor claims that this evi-dence would have been dismantled in court (Shephard 2010).

4Cultural racism is alternately referred to as “differential racism” (Balibar 2005), “new racism” (Duffield 2001),or “culturalism” (Razack 2008).

44 Constituting Omar Khadr

posed by “citizens of convenience.” A racialized category of citizenship that hasforcefully emerged in Canadian public discourse in recent years, citizens of con-venience are cast as absentee, disloyal, and inassimilable legal citizens whoexploit the benefits of Canadian society materially and politically. As such, thecitizen of convenience is rendered undeserving of the rights of “real” Canadians,including guarantees of state protection abroad. In the last instance, the logic ofracial nationalism aims to cast citizens of convenience outside of the politythrough practices of “pure exclusion” (Hage 2006). While culturally racializeddiscourses of childhood and citizenship operate relatively autonomously, the dis-courses intersect to produce, on the one hand, the pre-cultural child rendered award of liberal protection and, on the other hand, the child irredeemably satu-rated by a cultural upbringing who must be ejected from the Canadian politicalcommunity. In conclusion, I explore preliminary questions on how to think pastthe cultural racism in both liberal and racial-nationalist discourse and to counterdominant constructions of children by imagining young people as social andpolitical actors.In interpreting the permeation of cultural racism in childhood and citizenship

discourses, this article examines published opinion, specifically editorials, com-mentary, and letters to the editor, in Canada’s only two national newspapers, theGlobe and Mail and the National Post, from September 2002 to May 2011, gath-ered through the media search engine Factiva. The significance of publishedopinions are not that they represent an “accurate” reflection of “public” or “pop-ular” opinion, but that they are unabashedly involved in a project of trying tomake public opinion. In other words, published opinions are informative becausethey actively and self-consciously advance a normative position in public debate,frequently with the objectives of persuasion and prescription of what “ought” tobe. Before turning to an analysis of published opinion, I briefly review Khadr’scase and the controversy swirling around the Khadr family and elaborate on thecore concept of cultural racism.

From Bagram to Guantanamo

During the 90 days he spent at Bagram, Omar Khadr was interrogated 42 times(Khadr 2008:Aff.28). In an affidavit dated July 30, 2008, Khadr explains howinterrogation began “[d]uring the first three days I was conscious,” during whichtime he was painfully shackled “when [interrogators] did not like the answers Iwas giving” (Khadr 2008:Aff.7). Later he would be taken into the interrogationroom on a stretcher, on which he would be forced to sit up because the interro-gator “knew that it hurt me and he wanted me to answer questions” (Khadr2008:Aff.11). During interrogations, Khadr was exposed to barking dogs, whilehis “head was covered with a bag” that was “wrapped tightly around my neck,nearly choking me,” while at other times “interrogators threw cold water on me”(Khadr 2008:Aff.18). After tying Khadr’s hands above a door frame or chaininghis hands to the ceiling, interrogators would leave him hanging for hours. Withwounds still healing, he was forced to engage in heavy and tedious labor. Brightlights were shone into his eyes, which caused pain due to his unhealed eyeinjury. Forbidden to use the bathroom during interrogations, Khadr was oftenforced to urinate on himself and was continuously exposed to the anguishedcries of other detainees. Khadr quickly learned that:

The more I gave [the interrogator] the answers he wanted, the less pain wasinflicted on me. I figured out right away that I would simply tell them whatever Ithought they wanted to hear in order to keep them from causing me such pain.(Khadr 2008:Aff.12)

Augustine S. J. Park 45

In October 2002, after he had turned 16 years old, Khadr was transferred toGTMO where he was initially held in the Fleet Hospital, facing interrogation sixhours per day, before being placed in isolation. Detained with adults, ratherthan in Camp Iguana with the other juvenile detainees (Jamison 2005), Khadrwas threatened with rape and with being moved to another country for torture,dropped repeatedly on the ground, and subjected to the application of pressurepoints. On two occasions, Khadr was cuffed in uncomfortable positions, at somepoint urinating on the floor, after which,

[m]ilitary police poured pine oil on the floor and on me, and then, with melying on my stomach and my hands and feet cuffed together behind me, the mili-tary police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oilon the floor. (Khadr 2008:Aff.59)

Afterward, Omar was not permitted to shower or change his clothes for two days.In September 2004, Khadr was designated an “enemy combatant” under the

Combatant Status Review Tribunals which were established earlier that year; twomonths later he was charged with murder, attempted murder, conspiracy andaiding the enemy, and was to be tried by a military commission established by anexecutive order. Following the Hamdam judgment, issued by the US SupremeCourt, which ruled that the military commissions were in violation of the Uni-form Code of Military Justice which requires that military commissions conformto international humanitarian law, in particular the Geneva Conventions, theMilitary Commissions Act 2006 was passed, under which Khadr was chargedagain in 2007. Later the same year his charges were dismissed by the MilitaryCommission, the US government then appealed, resulting in the Military Com-mission review which overturned the decision to dismiss all charges (see Ahmad2007; Case of Omar Khadr n.d.). Khadr’s trial would not begin until August2010; however, by October that year he agreed to the plea bargain which eventu-ally enabled him transfer to Canada in September 2012 (Shephard 2012).During Khadr’s time in GTMO, the Canadian government was not passively

uninvolved but rather was active in its refusal to seek his repatriation. Despiteknowledge of his mistreatment, in 2003, agents of the Department of ForeignAffairs and International Trade (DFAIT), and the Canadian Security IntelligenceService (CSIS), interrogated Khadr for intelligence gathering purposes, and sub-sequently shared the fruits of the interrogation with Khadr’s US captors. InAugust 2005, a Federal Court ruling issued an injunction against further interro-gation (Khadr v. Canada 2005). In April 2009, a Federal Court ordered the Gov-ernment of Canada to seek Khadr’s repatriation, finding that the “ongoingrefusal of Canada to request Mr. Khadr’s repatriation to Canada offends a princi-ple of fundamental justice and violates Mr. Khadr’s rights” under the CanadianCharter of Rights and Freedoms (Khadr v. Canada 2009:para.92). The subse-quent appeal was dismissed in August 2009 (Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr2009). However, a January 2010 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada over-turned the order to seek Khadr’s repatriation, finding that while “Canadaactively participated in a process contrary to Canada’s international humanrights obligations and contributed to Mr. Khadr’s ongoing detention so as todeprive him of his right to liberty and security of the person …” (Canada (PrimeMinister) v. Khadr 2010:para. 48), “it would not be appropriate for the Court togive direction as to the diplomatic steps necessary to address the breaches of Mr.Khadr’s Charter rights” (Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr 2010:para.44).5 Whilemany scholars, following the work of Giorgio Agamben (1995), have theorizedGTMO as a “space of exception” (for example Gregory 2006; Reid-Henry 2007),

5See McGregor (2010) for a critique of the Supreme Court ruling and the litigations that led up to it.


this paper is concerned with the representation of Khadr in public discourses. Itis, however, worth noting that Khadr’s rightlessness and his “evict[ion] frompolitical community are racialized” (Razack 2008:7). Indeed, as Razack demon-strates, it is decidedly Arabs and Muslims who have been “cast out” in our post-9/11 world. Perhaps no family has been more outcast in Canada than theKhadrs.

An Al-Qaeda Family

The “Khadr clan”—a common moniker describing Omar’s nuclear family, evok-ing the racialized imagery of tribalism or pre-modernity—is no stranger to con-troversy. Although Omar was born in Toronto in 1986, from the age of two hespent much of his childhood in Pakistan, specifically in Peshawar where Osamabin Laden had been operating in the Islamist struggle against the Soviet pres-ence in Afghanistan (BBC News 2009). The second youngest of five children,Omar was raised in a family that “had prepared him for jihad since he was asmall boy” (Tietz 2006:60). His father, Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian immi-grant, is alleged to be one of the founding members of al-Qaeda and purport-edly raised funds for the organization through charitable fronts (CBC News 2006;Tietz 2006). In 1992, Ahmed was wounded by a landmine—reportedly whilefighting in Afghanistan—which took the family back to Canada for the durationof his recovery. Two years later, the Khadr family returned to Peshawar, followedsoon after by the imprisonment of Ahmed in 1996 because of suspected ties tothe bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. Maintaining his innocence,Ahmed went on hunger strike. He was released some weeks after the interven-tion of Canada’s then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien (CBC News 2004). After hisfather’s release, at the age of ten, Omar is purported to have lived with his fam-ily in Osama bin Laden’s compound, to have been presented to al-Qaeda lead-ers, to have received military training by the age of 15, and to have foughtalongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan (Tietz 2006;Human Rights Watch 2007:1).While the patriarch of the family died in a battle in Pakistan in 2003, Omar’s

brothers have likewise allegedly been involved in jihadist struggle. The eldest,Abdullah, who is said to have run al-Qaeda training camps, was arrested in Paki-stan in 2004, detained for 14 months, then released inexplicably. He is wantedin the United States on charges of weapons procurement for al-Qaeda; however,the extradition request has been denied by Canadian courts, in no small partbecause of the mistreatment he experienced while in Pakistani custody. TheSupreme Court of Canada has dismissed the government’s application for leaveto appeal the ruling (CBC News 2011). Omar’s second eldest brother, Abdurahman,who describes himself as the “black sheep” of the family—a great lover of theWestern lifestyle and a lackadaisical jihadist—claims to have worked for the CIAas a spy in a now infamous documentary entitled Son of al-Qaeda that aired firston the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and subsequently on thePublic Broadcasting Service in the United States.6 Omar’s younger brother,Abdul, was reportedly paralyzed in the same battle in which their father waskilled. The women of the Khadr family have attracted no less attention: Maha,mother of the Khadr family, has publicly expressed her support for martyrdomand her denunciation of corrupting influences in Canadian society. Meanwhile,the sole Khadr sister, Zaynab, is alleged to have helped run al-Qaeda trainingcamps. In Son of al-Qaeda, Abdurahman even claims that Osama bin Ladenattended Zaynab’s wedding (CBC News 2004, 2006, 2011).

6Transcripts of this documentary are available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/khadr/.(Accessed March 11, 2013.)


This article, however, is not concerned with the details of the Khadrs’ lives orthe accuracy of their own public statements about their activities. The question isnot whether it is accurate to describe the “Khadr clan” as an “al-Qaeda family” asthey are so often identified, but how the Khadr family has become a metonym forbroader trends in race thinking (Arendt 1968), which constructs some bodies asenemies to be cast out of political community. Specifically, narratives about theKhadrs are infused with cultural racism—a grammar of contemporary race think-ing in which culture “becomes an equivalent and a substitute for ‘race’” (Balibar2005:27). In other words, culture and race are not distinct social categories;instead, culture becomes racialized or comes to stand in for race. Rather than cast-ing the Khadrs as biologically inferior, cultural racism casts the Khadrs as funda-mentally culturally other (Goldberg 1993:73). Cultural alterity is naturalized, andthus, cultural identity becomes an essentialized and innate determinant of humanactions and relations (Balibar 2005:27). Under the logic of cultural racism, more-over, culture is foundational to identity formation and, in turn, determinesfriends and enemies such that difference becomes a source of conflict and discord(Huntington 1996; Duffield 2001). Such anxiety about difference has driven cul-tural racism to emerge as the logic underpinning “inter-cultural” relations rangingfrom parochial prejudice against immigrants and refugees to the global “clash ofcivilizations”—a thesis which asserts that primordial human divisions are civiliza-tional; that conflict inevitably emerges from contact between civilizations; thatWestern and Islamic civilizations in particular are destined for conflict; and thatthe West must focus on rebuilding and protecting our own civilization that is indecline and under siege from multiculturalism (Huntington 1996). While theWest is culturally unmarked (Park 2010a), associated instead with “civilization”(Merry 2003) and with “values,” having transcended “culture” through universal-ism (Razack 2008), the Muslim other is equated with the inescapably cultural,where culture becomes a code for orientalist discourses of terrorism, extremism,fanaticism, and bloody-mindedness, along with patriarchy, oppression, and anirrational, unprovoked hatred of all things Western. Similar to anxiety about“home-grown” terrorists, the construction of the Khadrs as “un-Canadian,” and asembodiments of Islamic hostility toward Western civilization, straddles parochialand global expressions of cultural racism that connect a perceived crisis in immi-gration to the larger civilizational battle fought between the West and the IslamicWorld. Before turning to the civilizational struggle over Canadian-ness in my inter-rogation of citizenship discourses, however, I first examine how the grammar ofcultural racism has shaped the discourse constituting Omar as a child soldier.

The Ambivalent Construction of Child Soldiers

Although the Canadian government has denied that Khadr was a child soldierbecause he did not belong to a regular army (Dallaire 2010), a widely acceptedinternational normative definition of a child soldier “is any child—boy or girl—under 18 years of age, who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armedforce or armed group in any capacity” (UNICEF n.d.).7 While his advocates

7There is no legal definition of a child soldier despite the existence of several treaties that outlaw the use ofchild soldiers (see Park 2010b), and the inclusion of recruitment of children as a war crime in both the SpecialCourt for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court. Such a capacious definition is normative and aspira-tional, but is arguably emerging as a customary understanding of the child soldier (or, in the new vocabulary, “childassociated with an armed force or armed group” (UNICEF 2007)), guiding international norms and policy. Notleast, a broad conception of child soldiers guides disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programming(DDR), which is the principal response advocated for child soldiers with the goals, generally, of removing childrenfrom militarized groups, reuniting them with their families, and reintegrating them into their communities through“psychological support and education, and economic opportunity” (Knight and €Ozerdem 2004:503, cited in Rivard2010); these goals stand in stark contrast to the torture, trial, and detention of Khadr.


argue that his status as a child soldier makes especially odious the Canadian gov-ernment’s failure to seek his repatriation, in fact international law relating tochild soldiers does not forbid the trial and detention of children alleged to havecommitted war crimes. Rather, the relevant international law is focused on pre-venting both the recruitment of children into armed groups and their deploy-ment according to varying age thresholds (Park 2010b). In any event, being achild soldier has been one of the central grammars in the deeply polarizedpolemic on what was to be done with Omar Khadr.The cleavage in the Khadr debate reflects the dichotomous and ambivalent con-

struction of childhood and child soldiers (Park 2007). In turn, the construction ofKhadr as a child is animated by questions of culture, as I will discuss momentarily.While there are multiple, overlapping, complementary, and contradictory dis-courses constituting childhood (see James, Jenks and Prout 1998), I am con-cerned with a specific constellation of discourses mobilized in the construction ofKhadr. The hegemonic social construction—which is historically and culturallyspecific (Aries 1962; Prout and James 1997), but which has been increasingly glob-alized (Stephens 1995; Burman 1996; Boyden 1997)—universalizes and naturalizeschildhood as a sentimentalized time of leisure, learning, dependence, and adulttutelage (for example, Goldson 1997). Children are, at the same time, constructeddyadically as both innocent and evil (James et al. 1998; Park 2007). Leading think-ers in the sociology of childhood, James et al. point to Rousseau as an early pro-moter of the view that children are intrinsically good (1998:13), whereas thefoundation of the image of the evil child can be located in the myth of originalsin wherein “children are demonic, harbourers of potentially dark forces” (Jameset al. 1998:10), as well as in Hobbes’ view of the nature of the human actor who,like a child, without the constraint of authority lives anarchically (James et al.1998:11). In addition, I contend that, in Khadr’s case, the core logic that under-pins the dyadic construction of children as both innocent and evil is a third dis-course: children as tabula rasa (James et al. 1998:16) and childhood as a perpetualcondition of “becoming” (Brownlie 2001).Children’s physiological incompletion (measured against the adult body) is

thought to signal their moral incompetence or pre-morality (Prout and James1997), which accounts simultaneously for children’s angelic purity and theirinclination to cruelty (Boyden 2003; Park 2007). Their biological immaturity isassumed to correspond to intellectual incapacity, making them unable to engagein autonomous thought or reason (Prout and James 1997; James et al. 1998).Thus, the steady hand of adult guidance and protection is crucial in children’sprocess of becoming human as they emerge from the state of incomplete per-sonhood. Children’s passage toward the summit of human development asadults, moreover, has been deeply racialized in its discursive conflation with theevolution of savages in the colonial imaginary—the one guided by adults andthe other by their colonizers (Hallowell 1976; Prout and James 1997). Whilechild development has been theorized as a “civilizing process” analogous to soci-etal transformation (Elias 1994), the notion of childhood and “primitivism devel-oped interchangeably” (Ashcroft 2001:39); as such, “racialized others have beeninvariably compared and equated to children,” while children are constructed“like racialized others, [as] not fully human” (Stoler 1995:150-151). The colonialinterpenetration of infantilizing and racializing discourses persists in the contem-porary construction of the universal Western adult/parent to the infantilized glo-bal South (Burman 1994; Pupavac 1998) and, more specifically, the Westernparent saving global Southern/racially marked children from the assumedincompetence of global Southern/racially marked adults to parent their ownchildren. The pastoral positioning of the West as protector and guardian of glo-bal Southern children is, as we shall see, a chief plank of liberal discourses whichcast Khadr as a ward of Western, liberal democracy.


The dyadic construction of child soldiers proceeds from the binary construc-tion of childhood. On the one hand, child soldiers are constructed as victims,robbed of their innocence, and coerced into committing acts that they cannotunderstand (for example, Machel 2001). As such, child soldiery has generallybeen cast as a form of victimization in which a “natural” childhood is stolenfrom the innocent (for example, Vittachi 1990). On the other hand, equallyrooted in the construction of the becoming child, child soldiers are constructedas menacing and dangerous, ruthless, bloodthirsty, and merciless (Faulkner 2001;Boyden 2003)—qualities that result from children’s purported pre-morality, under-developed sense of empathy (Boyden 1994; Furley 1995; Maxted 2003), andpotential for evil. Public debate on Khadr’s alleged actions, ordeals, and fate hasbroadly reflected this ambivalence in relation to children and child soldiers;however, this ambivalence is riddled with cultural discourses. Specifically, as Iargue in the following paragraphs, those who cast Khadr as the innocent childdesignate him as pre-cultural, without culture, or culture-neutral, appealing tothe universality of the hegemonic conception of childhood. Here, the universal-ity and naturalness of childhood transcends the relevance of culture, casting allchildren as essentially the same in their unknowingness and vulnerability, as wellas in their need for adult protection which, as outlined above, designates theWestern world as a universal parent to keep watch over the innocent child(Burman 1994; Pupavac 1998). Indeed, child saving is cast as a distinctly Westernresponsibility. As an extension of Khadr’s pre-culturalness, his advocates alsoconstruct Khadr as an innocent victim of his family’s culture. However, con-structing Khadr as a victim of culture meshes seamlessly with the view of detrac-tors who cast Khadr as the evil child as a result of his family’s culture. Thus,Khadr is transformed from a child victim to an irredeemably cultural enemy.

Innocence, Evil, and the Cultural Other

Claims in published opinion casting Khadr as the innocent child tend to equateKhadr with other child soldiers, evoking the heavily freighted iconography(Burman 1994) of the small, saucer-eyed African child abducted and coercedinto conflict (Paul-Carson 2008). This dovetails with the prevalent discourse inthe international community, including the UN and non-governmental organiza-tions, which regards Khadr’s as a “classic child soldier narrative: recruited byunscrupulous groups to undertake actions at the bidding of adults to fightbattles they barely understand” (CBC News 2010).The construction of Khadr as victim relies on transforming his (confessed, but

questionable) perpetration into a type of victimization: “children who areaccused of crimes under international law … should be considered primarily asvictims of offences, not perpetrators” (Rock and Kalajdzic 2009:A13) because“juveniles” are not “mature enough at the time of their presumed criminal actsto make a mature deliberate choice” (Paris 2007:A21). Further, since “[t]he lawregards a child soldier as a child victim …” Khadr should be “presumed to havebeen recruited illegally and to have served involuntarily” (Cotler 2008:A17). Infact, there is no publicly available evidence relating to whether Khadr’s involve-ment in al-Qaeda was coerced or voluntary. While Khadr has, in fact, been vic-timized, notably through the torture and inhumane treatment he endured whilein US custody, the discourse of innocent victimhood relies upon and reinforcesdominant discourses of the becoming child, in which children are cast as intel-lectual, moral and political incompetents, incomplete persons, and not quitefully human. Thus, Khadr’s redemption as the innocent child is predicated ondisempowering and discrediting him, along with all other child soldiers, as inca-pable of political and personal choice. Thus, victimization becomes a code forchildish incompetence, despite the scholarly evidence that children are social


agents (James et al. 1998) who are not only resilient, but also political (Cairns1996), and that child soldiers are capable of reasonable decision making (Petersand Richards 1998; Park 2010b). In this discourse, Khadr—along with all otherchild soldiers—is de-culturalized through an appeal to the assumption that thenature of childhood is universally identical, that the experience of child soldier-ing is everywhere the same, and that specificities, including cultural differences,are overridden by the essential sameness of children, in particular as tabula rasaand incomplete persons.As a child of a racialized family, the discourse relating to Khadr is modulated

by racism. Omar Khadr, in other words, is not just a child but is cast as an al-Qaeda child, victimized by his family’s “culture.” Here, “culture,” as explainedearlier, operates to racialize and is mobilized as a code for otherness. Indeed,the popular representation of Khadr is inextricable from the discourses that haveconstituted his family as an object of anxiety and hatred. That Khadr is consis-tently positioned as a child of an extremist family, as opposed to an individual, isa function of the homogenizing assumptions that non-Western others are princi-pally interpretable as collectives or in the aggregate, rather than as individualpersons (Razack 2008:33), as well as the stereotype of racialized persons lackingautonomy from the family or community unit. In the public discourse that con-stitutes Khadr, the concept of “family” has been coded as pathological andoppressive, an inescapable space impervious to the civilizing and moderatinginfluences of broader Canadian society, the defining agent of socialization andthe principal means to transmit “culture,” which has overdetermined Khadr’sfate. The construction of Khadr as a victim of his family’s culture collapses, onthe one hand, the innocent child, helpless in the face of his family’s extremismwith, on the other hand, the evil child, beyond the pale, crafted by his family’sgreat evil. Thus, the constructions of the innocent child and the evil child bothemerge from Khadr’s victimization at the hands of his family through politicaland religious “indoctrination” while in the fragile state of becoming. The evilchild is, thereby, forged out of the innocent child:

… as to whether Omar Khadr is a terrorist or a victim, my answer is that he isboth. He is a terrorist by virtue of his birth into a family which practised jihadand terrorist training. He has participated in terrorist activities. Yet this is the verything that also makes him a victim. Raised in this environment, he was brain-washed from birth. Even if he was aware of other life choices, how could a 15-year-old be expected to execute them? (Rivera 2008:A13)

As such, Khadr is the “victim of a warped upbringing,” which has led to his evilas a terrorist (McCulloch 2008:A11). He is a “victim of his own home,”“groomed” as a terrorist because he was “raised in a terrorist family” (Fine 2008:A19). This is articulated as a peculiarly racialized concept of child “abuse,” spe-cifically “indoctrination” with “hate and propaganda” “drilled into him from anearly age” (Richens 2004:A13). Casting Khadr as a victim of an evil family(which, in turn, makes him evil) makes three significant moves: First, this dis-course perpetuates the denial of children as social actors. Second, in locatingpathology in this particular family, it fails to critique the larger social phenome-non (in no way unique to Muslim families) of the almost absolute power thatadults—particularly adult family members—are virtually guaranteed over chil-dren in their care. Indeed, the idealized construction of childhood subordinateschildren to adult domination in the name of benevolent guidance. Third, thisdiscourse draws unabashedly on a deeply racist discourse which stereotypes Mus-lim families and beliefs: Khadr “was brainwashed by his own family … taughthatred and lied to and read passages from the Koran that justifies any killing ofinfidels” (Price 2010:A13).


The construction of Khadr as the evil child extends to the widespread assump-tion that he is dangerous. Described as a “psychopathic … killer” (Warwick12008:A11), a “hardened young fighter” (Wente 2010:A25), and a “remorselessindividual” (Gunter 2010:A22) who “trained to murder Westerners” (NationalPost 2010a:A24), Khadr is accused of “uttering his support for jihad clearly andconsciously” on surveillance tapes (National Post 2008:A12). While held atBagram, one commentator claimed, “[h]e is likely to be as at home … as any ofthe other al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners” (Morgan 2002:A20), although it ishard to imagine that anyone could be “at home” with being tortured. Theconstruction of Khadr as evil corresponds to the discourse advanced in his trialin which Dr. Welner, the psychiatrist testifying for the prosecution (who hassince faced challenges to his credibility), described Khadr as a “rock star” atGTMO, “a remorseless, unrepentant murderer regarded by radical jihadists as‘al-Qaeda royalty’ who” given his “credibility, pedigree, charisma, and provenrecord as a killer,” “could be expected to take a leadership role in the violentstruggle to destroy Western civilization” (Koring 2010:A19).The ambivalence about Khadr as a child soldier, in which he is alternately con-

structed as the universal innocent child devoid of culture, or the innocent childvictimized by his parents’ culture and thus transformed into the evil child who ishimself now irredeemably cultural, demonstrates how culturally racialized dis-courses are implicated in the question of belonging. Thus, the ambivalent con-struction of Omar as a child must be read against the conflicted discourses ofthe citizenship of racialized others.

Liberalism and Racial Nationalism

Public debate on the repatriation of Omar Khadr has fallen broadly into two cat-egories. On the one hand, the liberal view calls for Khadr’s repatriation in orderto preserve our own civility. The liberal discourse, thus, is principally concernedwith protecting Western values, civilization, and identity. On the other hand, theracial-nationalist view denounces Khadr as un-Canadian and a “citizen of conve-nience.” It is within this discourse of the citizen of convenience that the lan-guage of civilizational clash, described above, expresses itself in terms ofparochial anxieties about immigration. While liberal discourse employs culturallyracist constructions of the enlightened West against a barbaric other, the dis-course of citizenship of convenience employs a grammar of cultural racism todefine Canadian political community through exclusion. Childhood and citizen-ship discourses constructing Khadr operate, for the most part, autonomously;however, this section will also direct attention to some points of intersectionbetween the two discourses in which they operate synergistically.

Canada’s Liberal Identity

Liberal calls to “bring back Omar Khadr” (National Post 2010b:A12) in publishedopinion have been centrally focused on salvaging Canada’s identity as a Western,liberal democracy. While the liberal position advances some important criticismsof the War on Terror, liberal claims relating to Khadr are principally and over-whelmingly focused on anxiety about what the Khadr case means for Canada’ssense of self and place in the world. Abandoning Khadr to GTMO, as such, iscast as a threat to our civility and our identity as Westerners. A central motif incommentary supporting Khadr’s repatriation is that Canada is the only Westernstate to have left one of our nationals in GTMO. While the United States,through deviating from the justice processes of “settled democracies” (Paris2007:A21), is positioned as rogue or renegade from the Western values that oncemade it a great nation, Canada is positioned as a handmaiden to this betrayal of


Western civility. While other Western governments have been moved by injustice,“Canada, alone in the Western world, insisted on letting an abusive process work”(Globe and Mail 2010c:A18). With the tacit, culturally racist assumption that thenon-Western world approves of abuse, Canada’s failure to condemn GTMO castssuspicion on Canada’s Western credentials.Thus, according to liberal discourse, Canada risks becoming a pariah in the

fraternity of Western liberal democracies through our infidelity to a set of pur-portedly uniquely Western values of human rights, the rule of law, justice, anddemocracy. For example, if being Western means respecting the rule of law,Canada has abandoned its claim to this identity through the abandonment ofKhadr to “a legal black hole” (Globe and Mail 2008b:A18). Thus, “[o]ur interna-tional reputation as a law-abiding nation that protects its citizens is at risk” (Paris2007:A21). Moreover, intersecting with the discourse of the innocent child, Can-ada’s credentials as a Western, liberal democracy are also on the line for failingin the child-saving duty that emanates from the construction of the Western uni-versal parent, discussed above (Burman 1994). While nationals repatriated toother Western nations were adults, liberal discourse stresses that Canada “let ajuvenile languish” (Fine 2008:A19). “Canada has washed its hands of a citizenwho was just 15 when he was arrested” (Globe and Mail 2007b:A14).Anxiety about the demise of Canada’s identity as Western is accompanied by a

more specific discourse of the transformation of what it means to be Canadian.Indeed, one commentator eulogizes Canada’s former, romanticized identity as ahaven from injustice (for example, Salutin 2008) (while tidily ignoring settler colo-nialism, anti-immigrant racism, and myriad other indignities which blemish Can-ada’s past and present (for example, Razack 2002); indeed, the state’s damningindifference to Khadr’s suffering suggests that his treatment can be read as partof, rather than an exception to, Canada’s history relating to racialized others).Animated by cultural racism, the rallying cries to recover Canada’s identity as a

Western, liberal democracy demand that Canada distinguish our civility from theincivility of others. In broad terms, “[d]emocracies need to hold themselves to ahigher standard than that of the terrorists who oppose them” (Globe and Mail2008a:A16). In more particular terms, the Khadrs’ incivility is set up in contradis-tinction to what is incumbent on Canada as a Western democracy. The Khadrs’barbarity, extremism, intolerance, and (support for) terroristic violence not onlyshould not pollute our principles, but in fact test, define, and help us know whatit means to be Canadian and to be Western—very much in line with orientalistlogic that defines the self against the other (Said 1978). As such, commentatorscontinuously formulate what is the “right thing” to do (Globe and Mail 2010a:A22;2010b:A18), in contrast to who or what the Khadrs are and what they deserve: “…ultimately Canadians and their government need to move beyond their abhor-rence of the family and what it stands for. They need to ask what basic justicedemands” (Globe and Mail 2006:A18). Western values, such as the rule of law andequal rights of citizens, must trump the Khadrs’ barbarity and override questionsof popularity or merit. Thus, protections extend even to the most undeserving:

[Khadr’s] family flouts the values we cleave to; they have gone on televisionto declare themselves al-Qaeda supporters. But their popularity is not the point.Mr. Khadr’s Canadian citizenship, and the rule of law, [are] the point. (Paris2007:A21)

While liberal discourse is principally preoccupied with salvaging Canada’s iden-tity, the liberal conviction that legal citizenship comes with fundamental guaran-tees, even for those perceived as dismally illiberal, provides an important, butlimited, strategic defense of Khadr’s rights. In other words, liberalism—throughthe normative grammars of human rights and the rule of law—provides a


language for challenging Khadr’s treatment in US custody and the complicity ofthe Canadian government. However, the promise of a liberal defense for Khadris confounded by the foundational logics of liberalism in at least two ways.First, despite claims to universalism, longstanding feminist critiques have

shown that the liberal citizen has always been defined by exclusion (Scott 1996).While liberal citizenship may no longer be the exclusive domain of the property-owning adult white male, those deemed incompetent to hold full citizenship,such as young people, continue to be treated as wards rather than equal personsin the liberal polity (Franklin 1986; Freeman 1996; Archard 2004). In a perpetu-ation of infantilizing colonial discourses that disqualified the unevolved otherfrom enjoying full citizenship, Khadr is positioned not only as a child but as theproduct of a backwards culture, making him doubly the object of liberal protec-tion afforded him by his legal citizenship, but not a subject of full citizenship.Indeed, the liberal promotion of Khadr’s rights has been limited to demands toprotect him, but makes no reference to Khadr as a political agent entitled toexercise rights or entitlements. As such, liberal discourse again intersects with theconstruction of childhood as a state of becoming, where children are not yetcapable of exercising the full range of rights (see van Bueren 1998 on contrast-ing types of children’s rights).Second, despite rare critiques of racism that appear in liberal discourse relat-

ing to Khadr—to my count, explicit criticism of racism appears only twice in allarticles located (see Khan 2008; Attaran and Pardy 2009)—liberalism rests oncultural racism to define itself in contradistinction to a constructed other. Asillustrated above, liberal discourse is fraught with distinctions that work to“other” Khadr in the service of salvaging Canada’s badly battered reputation as aWestern liberal democracy. While asserting that Khadr’s legal citizenship entitleshim to the same treatment as other Canadians, Khadr is simultaneously and per-vasively marked as other. For instance, Khadr’s access to Canadian citizenshiprights is set against the alterity of his racialized family: “Regardless of Mr. Khadr’sfamily history” (Wolfe 2007:A14) or “whatever his family’s noxious views, he is aCanadian citizen” (National Post 2010b:A12). Alternatively, his equal citizenship isset in stark relief to his purported actions or beliefs as an “accused terrorist”(Globe and Mail 2007a:A16): Khadr has “constitutional rights—and no, he hasnot given them up [despite] fighting for a cause that goes against everything thiscountry stands for” (National Post 2010a:A24). Thus, despite the (rare) criticismsthat Khadr’s case has been shaped by racism, even the liberal discourse that lar-gely aims to advance Khadr’s cause insists on his fundamental difference. As itturns out, the liberal discourse that gestures at protecting Khadr is not at all atodds with the emergent racial-nationalist discourse of the citizen of convenience.

Racial-Nationalism and Citizenship of Convenience

The language of cultural racism has, in recent years, generated a new class of cit-izenship in Canada, that is, “citizenship of convenience.” Opponents of Khadr’srepatriation have advanced a racial-nationalist discourse that invokes the notionof the nation as a “biocultural kin group” (Razack 2008:16) to which immigrantsare perpetual outsiders. At the core of this discourse is the assumption that theKhadrs (and other racialized persons and immigrants) cynically exploit the bene-fits of living in Western society, while also engaging in treachery. Citizenship ofconvenience portrays the racialized citizen as one who takes advantage of bothmaterial benefits, such as health care, education, or pensions, as well as politicalbenefits, such as freedoms of association or religion as well as the liberal cultureof “tolerance,” yet whose relationship to Canada is essentially marked by absen-teeism, disloyalty, and inability or unwillingness to integrate. The discourse ofthe citizen of convenience, I contend, is among the principal sites of cultural


racism today, operating not only to define the Western self as open, tolerant,generous, and under siege, in contrast to the racialized other as conniving,manipulative, and treacherous, but also to demonstrate the cultural incommen-surability of the inassimilable alien and the Western host. A deeply racialized dis-course, which points to the “racial structure of citizenship” (Razack 2008:4),citizenship of convenience militates against immigration, against dual citizenshipand, perhaps, even against foreign travel.The discourse of citizenship of convenience has animated much of the public

condemnation of the Khadrs. The Khadrs are said to have no claim on Canada:“… Khadr had little connection to our country. He was in Afghanistan and Paki-stan most of the time, learning jihad and hanging out with Taliban soldiers”(National Post NP 2008:A12); as such, he is “more jihadi than a Canadian”(Gunter 2010:A22). In contrast to “real” Canadians, the Khadrs take advantageof Canada, while hating Canada and all that Canada represents. Exploiting Cana-dian tolerance in order to betray it, the father of the Khadr family, Ahmed,raised “his sons (women don’t count in that world, unless they can be talkedinto blowing themselves up) to reflect his hatred of all things democratic andWestern” (McParland 2010:A26). Omar was taught “to hate infidels and trainedto murder Westerners” (National Post 2010a). Here, we witness the intersectionof racial-nationalist discourse with discourses of the evil child as the outcome ofhis upbringing: Khadr has not only been reared to be a terrorist, but also to bea citizen of convenience. While Omar fought against “liberties,” he now hoists“rights and liberties … as flags of convenience” (Narbey 2008:A16).However, it is not only the climate of tolerance that the Khadrs exploit. Thus,

the senior Khadr is accused of having returned to Canada only when he requiredmedical treatment, and of having pulled the wool over the eyes of then-PrimeMinister Chretien who negotiated Ahmed’s release from custody in Pakistan onbombing allegations, only to raise his children as jihadists. Likewise, the motherof the Khadr family has been criticized for returning to Canada for medical treat-ment for her youngest son who was paralyzed in a battle fighting jihad, whiledenouncing what she perceives as moral decay in Canadian society. The Khadrfamily, “who continue to use the Canadian passport as a convenience, for healthcare and other needs” (Comeau 2010:A25), have “treated Canada as a ‘hotel’, atworst as a convenient jump-off point in the crusade for global jihad” (Boehmer2010:A15). Moreover, the Khadrs represent the intersection of the global clash ofcivilizations and the parochial hostility toward immigrants. While Canadian troopsfight in Afghanistan to protect our “way of life,” the Khadrs “chose Canada forconvenience” while trying “to destroy what so many young Canadians sacrificed—and continue to sacrifice—to build” (McDonald 2007:A20).In the racial structure of citizenship, the citizen of convenience is a legal, but

not civilizational, citizen. The Khadrs, in other words, may have a legal entitle-ment to citizenship rights, but they are un-Canadian and un-Western. This per-spective can be read through both liberal and racial-nationalist discourses. Inliberal discourse as explored above, Khadr is unquestionably un-Canadian; how-ever, his legal citizenship trumps his un-Canadian-ness. In racial-nationalist dis-course, the Khadrs’ cultural alterity, pitted against Western civilization, is theoverriding concern:

If this young man … and his family were truly Canadian, they would be actingquite differently. His sister would have been horrified by [Sgt. Speer’s death]instead of stating it was ‘no big deal’. His mother would have also been ashamedher son trained at the al-Qaeda terrorist camp, instead of stating she would‘rather see him over there than here in Canada on drugs and having somehomosexual relationship’. Obviously the Khadr family’s views of Western civilizationshow they are anything but ‘Canadian’. (McDonald 2005:A17, emphases added)


In contrast to liberal discourse, in racial-nationalist discourse legal citizenship isa privilege. Thus, the notion that legal citizenship corresponds with rights andprotections “is a dangerous supposition … Why should he be afforded the samerights as any Canadian, when his actions have not earned him this status? Rightsshould not be granted unconditionally” (Stockton 2008:A18). If rights are condi-tional, “Omar Khadr’s rights as a Canadian citizen ended the minute he chose toleave Canada to join a jihad against the Western world” (Moir 2009:A21). Repre-sented as a “traitor,” accusations are pervasive that Khadr “could as easily havebeen killing Canadian soldiers” (Henry 2006:A22) had he had the chance. Thepossibility that Khadr might have killed a Canadian and now seeks to return toCanada is, for the racial-nationalist discourse, the ultimate expression of the citi-zen of convenience: “he wants the Canadian government to come to his aid? …[H]is victims could just as easily have been his fellow countrymen. It seemsMr. Khadr asserts his Canadian citizenship when it suits [him]” (Lefler 2005:A24).Violently disloyal and inassimilably alien, Omar Khadr and his family do not

belong in Canada. Conversely, Canada does not belong to Omar Khadr; in thewords of one commentator: “the Maple Leaf does not look good on him; it doesnot belong” (Stinson 2002:A17). Canadian community, thus, is constructedthrough exclusion. Even liberal discourse that appeals to the formal rights of cit-izenship in salvaging Canada’s identity as a Western, liberal democracy neverasserts that the Khadrs “belong” here. Racial-nationalist discourse denies Canadaas a “home” for the Khadrs. While one commentator claims that Khadr shouldbe “returned home,” he argues that the Khadrs’ “antipathy toward Western cul-ture” makes their home “somewhere other than Canada” (Sciuk 2007:A14).Indeed, asks another commentator, “where is Mr. Khadr’s home?” Intersectingthe notion of childhood as a condition of becoming with racial-nationalist dis-course on belonging, the commentator goes on to argue: “He spent his forma-tive years in Pakistan and Afghanistan—perhaps he should be returned to oneof those homes” (Valcour 2008:A13).The notion of “home” or “belonging” is narrowly conceived in the racial-

nationalist discourse to preclude the very possibility that the Khadrs couldbelong in Canada. However, Ghassen Hage points out that outsidership—whichis produced and maintained through practices of marginalization and exclusion—nonetheless paradoxically constitutes a form of belonging. While an insiderbelongs to a given space, an outsider does not belong to that space, yet is withinit. As such, outsidership is, spatially, a condition of being inside; it is a particularmodality of being an insider and, as such, can form the basis for how designatedoutsiders may, in indeterminate ways, understand themselves to belong (Hage2006). Racial-nationalist discourse, however, is not content with defining theKhadrs as outsiders, but aims to push them absolutely outside, which amounts tothe rationality of “pure exclusion” (Hage 2006). The logic of pure exclusion con-fronts us starkly in questions such as: “[W]hy are they here?” (Smith 2008:A11)and “Is this the kind of person we want living in Canada?” (Sears 2008:A13).For racial-nationalists, the answer to the latter question is clearly “no.” In fact,

they “shouldn’t have been allowed into Canada in the first place” (Crosby 2008:A14). Now that they are here, one commentator wishes “the entire family wouldjust leave Canada and never come back” (National Post 2008:A12). This, indeed,could be arranged if we “strip the entire Khadr family of their citizenship anddeport them all” (Meyer 2008:A13). The impulse to strip legal citizenship fromcivilizational outcasts is not restricted to angry commentary in the media buthas, in fact, been debated in at least one formal political structure. The govern-ing Conservative Party’s 2011 convention included debate on a new “high trea-son” policy to strip citizenship from any Canadian caught fighting against theCanadian armed forces or Canada’s allies (Chase 2011). While the policy wasnot ultimately adopted, the presentation of such a proposal at the convention of


the ruling party suggests the power of racial-nationalist discourse in shifting to alogic of pure exclusion which spatially and politically pushes outsiders outside.

The Life and Times of Omar Khadr

This article has examined how cultural racism operates as the defining logic thatpermeates competing discourses relating to both childhood and citizenship inthe public construction of Omar Khadr. First, cultural racism saturates the dya-dic construction of childhood as both innocent and evil, while relying on theassumption that children are in a constant condition of becoming. On the onehand, the construction of Khadr as the innocent child represents Khadr as apre-cultural victim of his parents’ culture, which intersects with liberal discoursesof the child-saving West. On the other hand, the construction of Khadr as theevil child represents Khadr as the menacing outcome of his upbringing and thusirredeemably cultural, which resonates in racial-nationalist discourse that disqual-ifies Khadr from membership in the polity because he is a product of his familyand culture. Second, cultural racism animates the construction of citizenship.Liberalism’s exclusionary concept of citizenship renders Khadr a ward—as botha child and a racialized other—to whom rights of protection, but not full citizen-ship, are owed; at the same time, liberal discourse relies on a racist logic thatdefines the liberal self through practices of othering Khadr and his family. Racialnationalism aims to cast out the cultural other as citizens of conveniencethrough a logic of pure exclusion.Under the terms of his plea bargain, Omar Khadr could have returned to

Canada as early as October 2011. However, the Canadian government chose notto repatriate Khadr until a year later in September 2012. Now held in a federalpenitentiary in Edmonton, Alberta, Khadr’s fate in Canada is yet to be seen; how-ever, the significance of his story is already becoming clear. Khadr’s story—thestory of a boy born in the suburbs of Toronto, who at age 15 faced his torturersstrapped to a stretcher in a hospital in Afghanistan and who, now a decade later,has finally come home only to be imprisoned again—is a metonym for larger per-plexing issues. Khadr’s personal biography, perhaps more than most, deeplyreflects this moment in history. This article has focused on representations ofKhadr. Interrogating the discourses constructing Khadr sheds light on broaderforces and trends that go far beyond the life of one young man in several ways.First, examination of the representation of Khadr exemplifies the emergence

of cultural racism as a defining logic reshaping who belongs in the Canadianpolity, which we see likewise evidenced in a constellation of controversies—suchas Quebec’s niqab ban8 and anxiety over honor killings (Olwan 2013)—that haveswirled around a supposed clash between Canadian values and othered cultures.Second, in relation to both racialized citizenship and racialized childhood, theinterrogation of discourses constructing Khadr reveals an emergent schism inthe Canadian polity between, on the one hand, those nostalgic for a previouslyimagined liberal Canada and anxious about the erosion of that identity in thepost-9/11 world and, on the other hand, those who are keen to build a Canadadefined by a more conservative politic. Third, unpacking the public representa-tion of Khadr points to a need to pursue alternative, competing conceptions ofchildhood and citizenship. There is not enough space here to develop a pro-posal for such alternatives; however, I aim to gesture toward some possible ave-nues of thinking. Liberal and racial-nationalist discourse are not only saturatedwith cultural racism, but also treat Khadr as an object—either to be protected orcast out—rather than a subject. As such, any alternative discourse to challenge

8The National Assembly of Quebec, 39th Legislature, First Session, Bill 94, An Act to Establish Guidelines Governing

Accommodation Requests within the Administration and Certain Institutions.


the dominant constructions of Khadr must combine two core principles: anti-rac-ism and children as active agents.If a core logic of cultural racism is the essentialization of culture and the belief

that cultural difference overdetermines conflict, then anti-racism requires a de-essentialization of culture and indeterminancy pertaining to the consequences ofcultural difference. The de-essentialization of culture assumes that any notion ofculture must be dynamic and that we must resist “ossified versions of ethnic cul-tures” (Hage 2011), requiring a radical suspension of what we think we knowabout others, while the other defines herself. To use Hage’s terms, racializedpeoples may choose to “fix [themselves] in a cultural identity, but no one shouldhave the right to fix me” (Hage 2011). At the same time, cultural identity shouldnot overdetermine a person, defining who a person is at all times and in hertotality. Rather, any anti-racism that resists cultural racism must permit the “rightto oscillate” between a particular cultural identity and a general identity as ahuman being (Hage 2011). Such a notion of anti-racism challenges the essential-ism of cultural racism. In relation to Khadr, it forces us to suspend judgment onwhether, as liberals would argue, he had been victimized by his extremist cultureor, as the racial-nationalists would have it, he had been transformed into a threatby virtue of his cultural upbringing. Instead, anti-racism forces us to open thespace for cultural others to make their own, indeterminate claims about theiridentities.Anti-racist de-essentialization must intersect with reimagining children as social

and political actors. Critical social science of childhood has long argued thatchildren must be understood as active agents (James et al. 1998). Despite thedominant construction of children as passive, dependent, and incomplete, a sig-nificant body of research demonstrates that children are capable of reasonabledecision making and are political actors (Cairns 1996; Liebel 2003; Park 2010b).The recognition of children as active agents has prompted increasing problema-tization of the exclusion of children from full citizenship and has inspired callsfor enabling and empowering children’s participation as citizens rather thanmerely as passive wards (Roche 1999; Jans 2004; Park 2007). Indeed, if childrenwere treated as full citizens and, thus, the grip of adult authority (guaranteed bythe hegemonic ideal of childhood) loosened, it is hard not to wonder if Khadrmay have chosen a different path, one that would never have led to Guantanamo.An anti-racist concept of citizenship that combines synergistically with the citizen-ship of children may offer an alternative discourse to the liberal and racial-nation-alist construction of Khadr, or at least points to directions for further theorizingand research.

References

Khadr v. Canada. (2005) FC 1076.Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr. (2009) FCA 246.Khadr v. Canada (Prime Minister). (2009) FC 405.Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr. (2010) SCC 3, [2010] 1 S.C.R. 44.Case of Omar Khadr: Summary and Timeline. (n.d.) Available at http://www.law.utoronto.ca/

documents/Mackin/Khadr_summary-timeline.pdf. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)Agamben, Giorgio. (1995) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University

Press.Ahmad, Muneer I. (2007) Guantanamo is Here: The Military Commission Act and Noncitizen Vulnerability.

American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. Available at http://www.acslaw.org/files/ACS%20Issue%20Brief%20-%20Guantanamo%20-%20Final.pdf. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

Amnesty International. (2008) In Whose Best Interests? Omar Khadr, Child ‘Enemy Combatant’ FacingMilitary Commission. AMR 51/028/2008. Available at http://www.amnesty.ca/amnestynews/upload/AMR510282008summary.pdf. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

Archard, David. (2004) Children: Rights and Childhood. New York: Routledge.


Arendt, Hannah. (1968) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.Aries, Philippe. (1962) Centuries Of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage.Ashcroft, Bill. (2001) ‘Primitive And Wingless’: The Colonial Subject as Child. In On Postcolonial

Futures: Transformations Of Colonial Culture, edited by Bill Ashcroft. London: Continuum.Attaran, Amir, and Gar Pardy. (2009) At the Mercy of the Government; Ottawa Is Not Required

to Help Canadians in Trouble Overseas. A Law Should Be Passed to Protect Us. Globe and Mail,June 18, A23.

Balibar, Etienne. (2005) Difference, Otherness, Exclusion. Parallax 11 (1): 19–34.BBC News. (2009) Who Is Osama Bin Laden? December 6. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/

south_asia/1551100.stm. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)Boehmer, A. John. (2010) Omar Khadr: Does He Deserve Better? Letter to the Editor. National Post,

July 14, A15.Boyden, Jo. (1994) Children’s Experience of Conflict Related Emergencies: Some Implications for

Relief Policy and Practice. Disasters 18 (3): 254–267.Boyden, Jo. (1997) Childhood and Policy Makers: A Comparative Perspective on the Globalization of

Childhood. In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Social Study ofChildhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout. London: Falmer Press.

Boyden, Jo. (2003) The Moral Development of Child Soldiers: What Do Adults Have to Fear? Peaceand Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 9 (4): 343–362.

Brownlie, Julie. (2001) The ‘Being-Risky’ Child: Governing Childhood and Sexual Risk. Sociology 35(2): 519–537.

van Bueren, Geraldine. (1998) The International Law on the Rights of the Child. Boston: MartinusNijhoff.

Burman, Erica. (1994) Innocents Abroad: Western Fantasies of Childhood and the Iconography ofEmergencies. Disasters 18 (3): 238–253.

Burman, Erica. (1996) Local, Global or Globalized? Child Development and International ChildRights Legislation. Childhood 3: 45–66.

Cairns, ED, Ed. (1996) Children As Political Activists. In Children And Political Violence. Oxford:Blackwell.

CBC News. (2004) Al-Qaeda Family: A Family Divided. March 3. Available at http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/khadr/alqaedafamily2.html. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

CBC News. (2006) The Khadr Family. October 30. Available at http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/khadr/. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

CBC News. (2010) Omar Khadr Apologizes to Widow. October 29. Available at http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/10/28/omar-khadr-sentencing-hearing.html. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

CBC News. (2011) Abdullah Khadr Won’t Be Extradited. July 29. Available at http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/11/03/scoc-abdullah-khadr.html. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

Chase, Steven. (2011) Tory Convention to Consider ‘High Treason’ Punishment Proposal. The Globeand Mail, May 31. Available at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tory-convention-to-consider-high-treason-punishment-proposal/article2040793/. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

Comeau, Larry. (2010). Readers Have No Sympathy for Omar Khadr. Letter to the Editor. NationalPost, October 16, A25.

Cotler, Irwin. (2008) It May Not Be Popular but It’s the Right Thing to Do. Globe and Mail,February 26, A17.

Crosby, Wally. (2008) In the Matter of Khadr. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, July 22, A14.Dallaire, Romeo. (2010) Casualties of War. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, July 21, A14.Duffield, Mark. (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security.

London: Zed Books.Elias, Norbert. (1994) The Civilising Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and

Civilisation. Cambridge: Blackwell.Faulkner, Frank. (2001) Kindergarten Killers: Morality, Murder and the Child Soldier Problem.

Third World Quarterly 22 (4): 419–504.Fine, Sean. (2008) A Most Peculiar Young Offender; Omar Khadr Should be Dealt With Here in

Canada, as a Juvenile who Was Involved in Terrorism. Globe and Mail, March 22, A19.Franklin, Bob. (1986) The Rights of Children. New York: Blackwell.Freeman, Michael. (1996) Introduction: Children as Persons. In Children’s Rights: A Comparative

Perspective, edited by Michael Freeman. Dartmouth: Aldershot.Furley, Oliver. (1995) Child Soldiers in Africa. In Conflict in Africa, edited by Oliver Furley.

London: I.B. Tawns.Globe and Mail. (2006) Try Khadr or Free Him. Editorial, July 1, A18.


Globe and Mail. (2007a) Give Omar Khadr a Ticket to Canada. Editorial, June 5, A16.Globe and Mail. (2007b) Canada and Omar Khadr. Editorial, November 12, A14.Globe and Mail. (2008a) Behind Dallaire’s Rhetoric. Editorial, May 15, A16.Globe and Mail. (2008b) The Rule of Law Prevails. Editorial, June 13, A18.Globe and Mail. (2009) From Obama to Harper. Editorial, January 15, A16.Globe and Mail. (2010a) A Moral Victory. Editorial, January 30, A22.Globe and Mail. (2010b) Edging Toward the Right Thing. Editorial, February 18, A18.Globe and Mail. (2010c) No Justice, Where There Is Coercion. Editorial, May 7, A18.Goldberg, David Theo. (1993) Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishing.Goldson, Barry. (1997) ‘Childhood’: An Introduction to Historical and Theoretical Analyses. In

‘Childhood’ in ‘Crisis,’ edited by Phil Scraton. London: UCL Press.Gregory, Derek. (2006) The Black Flag: Guantanamo Bay and the Space of Exception. Geografiska

Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88 (4): 405–427.Gunter, Lorne. (2010) A Jihadi who Leaves Me Cold. National Post, October 27, A22.Hage, Ghassen. (2006) Insiders and Outsiders. In Sociology: Place, Time and Division, edited by Peter

Beilharz and Trevor Hogan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hage, Ghassen. (2011) What Should ‘Championing Multiculturalism’ Mean Today? Keynote Address

Presented to the National Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasters’ Council’s NationalConference, Launceston, November 26.

Hallowell, Irving. (1976) The Child, the Savage, and Human Experience. In Rethinking Childhood:Perspectives on Development and Society, edited by Arlene Skolnick. Boston: Little, Brown andCompany.

Henry, William E. (2006) Khadr not a Soldier. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, January 14, A22.Human Rights Watch. (2007) The Omar Khadr Case: A Teenager Imprisoned at Guantanamo. Available

at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2007/06/01/omar-khadr-case. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New

York: Simon & Schuster.James, Allison, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout. (1998) Theorising Childhood. New York: Teachers

College Press.Jamison, Melissa A. (2005) Detention of Juvenile Enemy Combatants at Guantanamo Bay: The

Special Concerns of the Children. UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy 9 (1): 127–170.Jans, Marc. (2004) Children as Citizens: Towards a Contemporary Notion of Child Participation.

Childhood 11 (1): 27–44.Khadr, Omar. (2008) Affidavit of Omar Ahmed Khadr. Khadr v. Canada (Prime Minister). File T-1228-

08. Available at http://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/Mackin/khadr_repat_AffidavitofOmarKhadr.PDF. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

Khan, Sheema. (2008) Do we Have Two-Tier Citizenship in Canada? Globe and Mail, August 7, A17.Koring, Paul. (2010) Emotional Testimony Evokes Speer’s Legacy; Defence Also Tries to

Undermine Earlier Warnings That Former Child Soldier Likely to Remain Dangerous. Globe andMail, October 28, A19.

Lefler, E. (2005). Not a Capital Case. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, November 12, A24.Liebel, Manfred. (2003) Working Children as Social Subjects: The Contribution of Working

Children’s Organizations to Social Transformations. Childhood 10 (3): 265–285.Machel, Graca. (2001) The Impact of War on Children: A Review of Progress Since the 1996 United Nations

Report on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. New York: Palgrave/UNICEF.Maxted, Julia. (2003) Children and Armed Conflict in Africa. Social Identities 9 (1): 51–72.McCulloch, Peter. (2008) Omar Khadr: Terrorist or Victim? Letter to the Editor. National Post, July

18, A11.McDonald, L. (2005) The Khadrs and ‘Canadian’ Values. Letter to the Editor. National Post,

February 12, A17.McDonald, Nancy. (2007) Insult to our Troops. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, April 4, A20.McGregor, Lorna (2010) Are Declaratory Orders Appropriate for Continuing Human Rights

Violations? The Case of Khadr v Canada. Human Rights Law Review 10 (3): 487–503.McParland, Kelly. (2010) Omar Khadr’s Bleeding-Heart Club. National Post, October 16, A26.Merry, Sally Engle. (2003) Constructing a Global Law-Violence Against Women and the Human

Rights System. Law and Social Inquiry 28 (4): 941–979.Meyer, Bill. (2008) Mixed Emotions About Khadr. Letter to the Editor. National Post, July 17, A13.Moir, Bryan. (2009) Omar Khadr Has Forfeited his Rights. Letter to the Editor. National Post, April

25, A21.


Morgan, Ed. (2002) Don’t Stand on Guard for Omar. National Post, September 12, A20.Narbey, Greg. (2008) Tolerance, and the Lack of It. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, May 27,

A16.National Post. (2008) Keep Khadr Where He Is. Editorial, July 17, A12.National Post. (2010a) The Correct Decision on Omar Khadr. Editorial, January 30, A24.National Post. (2010b) Bring Back Omar Khadr. Editorial, August 10, A12.Olwan, Dana M. (2013) Gendered Violence, Cultural Otherness, and Honour Crimes in Canadian

National Logics. In Canadian Journal of Sociology 38 (4): 533–555.Paris, Erna. (2007) Why the Khadr Case Is an Affront to the Rule of Law. Globe and Mail, September

26, A21.Park, Augustine S.J. (2007) Children as Risk or Children at Risk? International Law, Child Soldiers

and Citizenship: The Case of Sierra Leone. In Risk & Trust: Including or Excluding Citizens?,edited by Law Commission of Canada. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing.

Park, Augustine S.J. (2010a) Peacebuilding, the Rule of Law and the Problem of Culture:Assimilation, Multiculturalism, Deployment. Journal of Statebuilding and Intervention 4 (4):413–432.

Park, Augustine S.J. (2010b) Child Soldiers and Distributive Justice: Addressing the Limits of Law?Crime, Law and Social Change 53 (4): 329–348.

Paul-Carson, Patricia. (2008) Blame in the Khadr Case. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, July17, A16.

Peters, Krijn, and Paul Richards. (1998) ‘Why We Fight’: Voices of Youth Combatants in SierraLeone. Africa 68 (2): 183–209.

Price, Valerie. (2010) Who is a ‘Child Soldier’? Letter to the Editor. National Post, August 12, A13.Prout, Alan, and Allison James. (1997) A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood?

Provenance, Promise and Problems. In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: ContemporaryIssues in the Social Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout. London: FalmerPress.

Pupavac, Vanessa. (1998) The Infantilization of the South and the Convention on the Rights of theChild. In International Human Rights in Context, edited by Henry Steiner and Alston Philip.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Razack, Sherene H. (2002) Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto:Between the Lines.

Razack, Sherene H. (2008) Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Reid-Henry, Simon. (2007) Exceptional Sovereignty? Guantanamo Bay and the Re-Colonial Present.Antipode 39 (4): 627–648.

Richens, Gordon. (2004) Indoctrinating Children. National Post, November 1, A13.Rivard, Lysanne. (2010) Child Soldiers and Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration

Programmes: The Universalism of Children’s Rights vs. Cultural Relativism Debate. The Journal ofHumanitarian Assistance. Available at http://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/772. (Accessed January12, 2013.)

Rivera, K. (2008) A Terrorist, and a Victim. Letter to the Editor. National Post, July 17, A13.Roche, Jeremy. (1999) Children: Rights, Participation And Citizenship. Childhood 6 (4): 475–493.Rock, Allan, and Jasminka Kalajdzic. (2009) Justice Demands That We Now Repatriate Omar

Khadr. Globe and Mail, January 26, A13.Said, Edward. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage.Salutin, Rick. (2008) Barack Obama and Elijah of Buxton. Globe and Mail, November 7, A21.Sciuk, Robert S. (2007) Catch and Release. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, August 22, A14.Scott, Joan. (1996) Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminism and the Rights of Man. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.Sears, Brenda. (2008) Mixed Emotions About Khadr. Letter to the Editor. National Post, July 17,

A13.Shephard, Michelle. (2010) Unanswered Questions in 8-Year Omar Khadr Saga. Toronto Star,

November 5. Available at http://www.thestar.com/specialsections/omarkhadr/article/886856–the-last-guantanamo-ferry. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

Shephard, Michelle. (2012) Omar Khadr Repatriated To Canada. Toronto Star, September 29.Available at http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1264337–omar-khadr-repatriated-to-canada.(Accessed January 12, 2013.)

Smith, Don. (2008) I Wish the Khadr Family Would Just Leave Canada and Never Come Back.Letter to the Editor/Best of the Blog. National Post, July 21, A11.


Stephens, Sharon. (1995) Introduction: Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism’. InChildren and the Politics of Culture, edited by Sharon Stephens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.

Stinson, Kathleen. (2002) Getting What he Deserves. Letter to the Editor. National Post, September23, A17.

Stockton, Greg. (2008) Rights, Obligations, Omar Khadr. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail,February 7, A18.

Stoler, Ann Laura. (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and theColonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Tietz, Jeff. (2006) The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr. Rolling Stone, August 24. 1007: 60–68.UNICEF. (2007) The Paris Principles: Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated With Armed Forces or

Armed Groups. Available at http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/465198442.html. (AccessedMarch 19, 2013.)

UNICEF. (n.d.) Fact Sheet. Available at http://www.unicef.org/emerg/files/childsoldiers.

pdf. (Accessed January 12, 2013.)

Valcour, Gary F. (2008) Mixed Emotions About Khadr. Letter to the Editor. National Post, July 17,A13.

Vittachi, Anuradha. (1990) Stolen Childhood: In Search of the Rights of the Child. Oxford: Polity.Warwick1. (2008) I Wish the Khadr Family Would Just Leave Canada and Never Come Back. Letter

to the Editor/Best of the Blog. National Post, July 21, A11.Wente, Margaret. (2010) Welcome Back, you Lucky Guy. Globe and Mail, October 26, A25.Wolfe, Yvette. (2007) No Ticket to Ride. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail, June 6, A14.


constituting omar khadr: cultural racism, childhood, and citizenship

Documents