Landmines: evolution, types and the postwar legacy

The landmine is the weapon that does not withdraw when the war ends. A mine is a device placed in the ground that acts when someone triggers it, so its military effect — denying ground, channelling an enemy, protecting a flank — outlives the reason it was laid. What makes it tactically valuable is exactly what makes it a humanitarian problem in dozens of countries.

This article covers the historical evolution, the main families of mines, and the documented postwar consequences, using figures published by specialist bodies. It deliberately avoids design, laying or neutralisation detail: that is work for trained deminers, not material for a general readership.

From the fougasse to the industrial mine

The idea is old: the fougasse of early modern siege warfare was a buried charge fired against an attacker. The conceptual leap came with victim-operated activation. During the American Civil War, the buried charges used by the Confederate general Gabriel Rains already provoked a moral argument about legitimacy, precisely because they did not distinguish who stepped on them.

The First World War normalised the anti-tank mine as a direct answer to armour. The Second turned mining into an industry, with standardised designs sown by the million across North Africa, the Eastern Front and Western Europe. The Cold War added scatterable mines delivered by artillery and aircraft over wide areas, which multiplied both the quantities used and, more damagingly, the impossibility of recording where they landed.

The main families of mines

The distinction between anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines is legally decisive: the Ottawa Treaty bans the former, not the latter. There is also a significant grey zone. Improvised devices and explosive remnants of war — unexploded shells and submunitions — produce mine-like effects and belong to the same land-contamination problem, even though different legal instruments govern them.

What happens after the ceasefire

The postwar damage is not only the casualty count. Contaminated land blocks farmland, wells, roads, schools and power lines, and prevents displaced people from returning to areas that are nominally safe. Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina and, more recently, Ukraine are among the territories with extensive contamination documented by mine-action agencies.

• Civilians take most of the harm: Landmine Monitor annual reports consistently put civilians at roughly 80 per cent of recorded casualties, with children a substantial share.
• Asymmetric cost: producing a mine costs a fraction of what it costs to find and safely destroy it.
• Long timescales: clearing an affected country is measured in decades and depends on unstable international funding.
• Economic impact: fertile land taken out of use, livestock losses, and lifelong medical rehabilitation for survivors.

The legal framework and its present fragility

The Convention on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines, known as the Ottawa Treaty, was adopted in 1997 and entered into force on 1 March 1999. It bans use, production, stockpiling and transfer, and requires states to destroy stockpiles and clear their own territory. More than 160 states have ratified it, but major actors remain outside, including the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Israel. An earlier partial framework, Amended Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, regulates use without prohibiting it.

That consensus is now under strain. During 2025 several states on Europe's eastern flank announced their intention to leave the Ottawa Treaty, citing defensive needs against Russia — a move criticised by the ICRC and humanitarian mine-action organisations. This is an ongoing process with formal withdrawal periods, not a settled change: any statement about the treaty's current membership should be checked against the depositary's official records and the latest Landmine Monitor report.