2017/12/14 by Edward Fairhead · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Political Theology and Sovereignty #War, Ethics, and Justification #Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy #Antithesis #Adversary #Politics #Presidency #Drone #Law #Relation (database) #Foreign policy #Political science #Sociology #Philosophy #Epistemology #Computer security
paper · doi:10.1080/14797585.2017.1410991
openalex publication_date 2017/12/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When George Bush declared to his global audience that they were either ‘with us or against us’, he appeared to directly invoke the Schmittian antithesis of friend vs. enemy. Against the historical backdrop of Bush’s war on terror, and the scholarly attention his foreign policy received in relation to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, this paper examines whether the Obama administration’s targeted killing regime has marked a departure from Schmitt’s paradigms of war and enmity. Focusing specifically upon the rapid increase in use of drone strikes during Barack Obama’s presidency, this paper argues that the production of the enemy’s abstractness and drive for its annihilation together push at the limits of the Schmittian political logic. However, rather than denoting the point at which political relations are unexplainable through a Schmittian lens, this paper proposes that this produced enemy and its treatment in drone ‘warfare’ obfuscates the lines between a complex of Schmittian paradigms.