In August 2020, a twelve-year-old girl named Raheela Bibi was playing outside with her siblings in Pakistan when a landmine detonated beneath them. Both of her hands were amputated. Her sister sustained a serious leg wound; her brother lost the use of one eye. Three years later, Bibi told reporters that completing her homework was extraordinarily hard — and that she intended to keep doing it anyway.

Her story is not exceptional. According to a preliminary analysis by the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, more than 5,000 people were killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance in 2024 alone, the vast majority of them civilians. The weapon's original logic is coldly rational. Anti-personnel landmines were engineered to maim rather than kill, because a wounded soldier drains an enemy's medical and logistical resources more heavily than a dead one.

In peacetime, however, that calculus inverts with brutal consequences. Children, who are smaller and lighter, frequently die from injuries that would merely cripple an adult. In South Sudan, 90 percent of last year's victims were children. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, four decades after the Yugoslav wars ended, farmers and hikers still encounter ordnance left behind by the conflicts of the 1990s.