Military irregularity and the problem of social order in the light of Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan: Between the political and the criminal

The last decades have been marked by an increasingly widespread presence of irregular warfare in both international and internal conflicts. The most sought-after theoretical framework for understanding the nature and activities of irregular formations remains Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan published in 1963. The article reconsiders Schmitt’s criteria of partisanship and presents irregular warfare as a social phenomenon outside the social order maintained by the state, which potentially threatens the state despite their initial convergence of interests. The criminalization of the irregular combatant, carried out by the occupying force of the international conflict, might be continued by his subsequent criminalization by the social order which he had previously helped to restore. Although the Theory of the Partisan implies such an explanation, it does not fully develop it. The author identifies a reverse relationship between the internal politicization of irregular formations and their external criminalization: the occupant disregards the partisan’s political motives, focusing on the criminal methods of armed struggle and considering the partisan as merely a flagrant disturber of order to be neutralized by police operations. On the other hand, the yesterday’s hero can be declared a criminal by the regularity that previously provided him with support, if he converts the high intensity of his political commitment into demands to the regularity. Although such initiatives might be considered as a continuation of the political struggle by the partisan, they can be interpreted as a direct threat to social order by the state, which leads to criminal prosecution. Thus, the encouragement of irregular warfare is an effective means of combating external aggression in the short term, but in the long term it becomes dangerous as threatening social order. The author makes a conclusion about the indistinguishability of the political and the criminal under the full-fledged civil conflict due to the mutual criminalization of its participants and to the politicization of their criminal means of violence, providing some historical examples to show various manifestations of the criminal-political ambivalence of irregular formations.