| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/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."
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