Family, country, and conditional humanity: the imagined childhood of Canada’s child soldier

Child soldiering is seen as an aberration, a disjuncture from how an ideal childhood is imagined. And yet, the story of Canadian citizen and child soldier, Omar Khadr, complicates the othering implied by the Western imaginary and invites us to de-abstract the category of child soldier. Through a content analysis of coverage on Khadr in Canada’s top three newspapers, we explore how Khadr’s victimhood was constructed and interpreted by the media. We argue that Khadr’s humanisation and victimisation were portrayed as conditional, with conditionalities being constructed through the lenses of family and gender, childhood, citizenship and national identity. The framework of conditional humanity, as developed in the paper, makes an intervention to problematise and question the ways in which narratives of victimhood exclude some child soldiers while including and humanising others.