Abstract

The category of unlawful enemy combatant has played a central role in the struggle that Western countries have undertaken against terrorists on the global scale since September 11. It has been employed by courts and judges, by legal scholars in academic debates, as well as by policymakers and state officials to justify extrajudicial killings or indefinite detentions before the public opinion. The category leans on the denial of the absoluteness of the principle of distinction between combatants and non-combatants in war and marks itself a specific, exceptional distinction that breaks down the difference between war and peace. In the first part, this article looks at how the category has been deployed in the context of the global war on terror and what purposes it has served. While in the second part, the article tries to reconstruct the intellectual processes that led the category of unlawful enemy combatant to acquire such a legal and political legitimacy as to become a significant intellectual tool to represent the enemy as individual in the frame of the global war on terror.