Partisan theory

The Partisan is the "irregular fighter." In this book, published for the first time in 1963, the renowned and controversial German legal, constitutional, and political theorist, Carl Schmitt, completes his work that he had begun in his previous book "The Concept of the Political" (1932), analyzing the phenomenon of the partisan, which heralded the emergence of a new theory about war and enmity. Schmitt's theory of the partisan is a significant contribution to the understanding of our era, in which traditional political hostility turns into a state where enemies are branded as criminals and stripped of their humanity. From Clausewitz to Lenin, then Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Raoul Salan, and from Spanish guerrilla wars against Napoleonic invasion to the Vietnam War, Schmitt traces the transformation of the concept of enmity that governed wars between sovereign European states into a doctrine that sees the political enemy as a target for complete extermination. Therefore, the importance of this work is not limited to its historical dimension alone, but it also contributes to understanding our political reality in the contemporary world in general and in the Arab world in particular, against the backdrop of the spread of phenomena of irregular and semi-regular fighters in the East and West.