Partisan and Nomad — Figures of Irregular Violence

BLUF

The 20th-century philosophical typology of the Partisan (Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, 1963) and the Nomad / War Machine (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 1980) provides the foundational dyad for analysing irregular adversaries operating within and against the modern state. Schmitt’s Partisan is telluric (rooted in concrete soil), defensive, dependent on a sovereign for political recognition, and oriented toward re-territorialisation — the founding of a new legal-political order. Deleuze-Guattari’s Nomad is the War Machine — exterior to the state, operating in smooth space, organised as rhizome, oriented toward pure de-territorialisation and lines of flight. Real-world irregular actors (Viet Cong, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, YPG/Rojava) are not pure types but strategic hybrids. This typology matters for hybrid-threat analysis because it provides the canonical conceptual grammar for Gray Zone / Hybrid Warfare adversary classification, and — when extended via Bataille (sovereign expenditure) and Agamben (state of exception, homo sacer, bare life) — explains forms of contemporary violence that Clausewitzian instrumentalism cannot account for.

Theoretical Foundation

Schmitt’s Partisan — Born from the Collapse of Jus Publicum Europaeum

The “genuine” Partisan is a specific historical figure born from the collapse of the classical European state system (jus publicum europaeum) — the Westphalian-era system of bracketed state-to-state warfare that achieved the “rationalisation and humanisation of war” through:

• War as public affair between sovereign states (not private factions).
• Regular armies identifiable by uniforms (visible distinction between combatant and non-combatant).
• Mutual recognition of enemy as justus hostis (legitimate enemy, not criminal/pirate). Distinction between public enemy (hostis) and private adversary (inimicus) allowed limitation, negotiation, peace treaties without total destruction.
• Spatial containment within Europe (the “amity lines” model — colonial space outside Europe was open territory). See Cabinet-War-Paradigm for the system whose collapse the Partisan inhabits.

The French Revolution and Napoleonic campaigns shattered this contained order. The modern Partisan emerges in reaction to French occupation of Spain — Spanish guerrillas waging irregular war against a modern regular army, but only after their own regular army was defeated. The Partisan is thus a figure that can only exist in the juridical vacuum of a dying legal order, a ghost haunting the space between bracketed enmity and the dawning age of total war.

The Four Constitutive Criteria

Schmitt defines the genuine Partisan through four mutually reinforcing criteria:

1. Irregularity — More than tactical choice. The lack of uniform and refusal to carry weapons openly is a fundamental challenge to the legal framework of classical warfare, dissolving the combatant/civilian distinction and forcing the regular army into a logic of counter-terror against the entire population.

2. Enhanced mobility — Speed, flexibility, surprise, rapid retreat. Function of deep integration with terrain and civilian population (cover, intelligence, sustenance).

3. Intense political commitment — What distinguishes Partisan from criminal, pirate, bandit (private gain). Grounded in the fundamental political act: concrete designation of the public enemy (hostis). Schmitt distinguishes the Christian command to “love your enemies” as referring only to private inimicus (Greek echthros), not public hostis (Greek polemios) — carving out space for political conflict not bound by private morality.

4. Telluric character — The decisive anchoring criterion. Genuine Partisan is fundamentally defensive and rooted in the soil (tellus) of a specific concrete homeland (Spanish guerrillas, Tyrolean rebels). This is not romanticism; it is a profound theoretical move grounding politics in the concrete and finite as bulwark against the limitless abstract violence of universalist ideologies. (“He who says humanity lies.”) The tellus keeps enmity real by giving it a concrete finite objective and preventing it from spiralling into global war of annihilation.

Real and Absolute Enmity

The critical distinction encapsulating Schmitt’s anxieties about modern conflict trajectory:

• Telluric Partisan defending concrete territory fights a “real enemy” — opponent to be repelled, not absolute evil to annihilate. Conflict is contained by terrestrial goal.
• When the Partisan loses the telluric anchor and becomes “motorised” by universalist ideology (Schmitt’s primary examples: Leninist and Maoist international revolutionaries fighting for global class struggle / world revolution), the enemy becomes an abstraction — bourgeoisie, imperialism, “enemy of all mankind.” Must be totally annihilated.
• This transforms real enmity into absolute enmity, unleashing war without spatial, temporal, or ethical limits. Because the enemy is defined as inhuman, any means become justified — driving conflict to “the most extreme inhumanity.”

This analysis brilliantly anticipates 20th-century absolute-enmity conflicts and remains profoundly relevant to contemporary struggles where opponents are framed as absolute evils to be erased rather than legitimate adversaries.

The Sovereign Ambiguity

Despite irregularity, the Partisan remains dependent on a connection to a regular sovereign entity — not just for logistical support (arms, supplies, intelligence) but for political recognition. For Partisan struggle to be political and not merely criminal, it ultimately seeks validation from a sovereign power that can recognise its legitimacy and, on victory, re-establish a new legal order.

This connects directly to Schmitt’s core sovereignty theory: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The Partisan fights within the state of exception (where normal legal order is suspended) but oriented toward creation of a new norm. The Partisan is thus paradoxical: an agent of irregularity whose actions aim at founding a new regularity; a lawless fighter whose struggle is rendered meaningful by orientation toward future law.

The Nomad — Abstract War Machine (Deleuze-Guattari)

If Schmitt’s Partisan is born from state crisis, the Nomad is ontologically prior to the state.

Exteriority and Smooth Space

The State does not come first; it is a secondary apparatus of capture that congeals in reaction to the threat posed by nomadic flows that precede and surround it. The conflict is not merely a clash of armies but ontological antagonism between two modes of organising reality:

• Spatial logic: State striates space (borders, walls, grids, metric/hierarchical/optically legible world controllable from a centre). War Machine inhabits and produces smooth space — open, acentered, continuous; defined by vectors, speeds, affects, not points and properties. Eurasian steppe, sea, desert as archetypal smooth spaces; also global flows of finance and data. The Nomad does not move within a pre-existing grid; the movement is the creation of the path.

• Organisational logic: State is arborescent (tree-like — hierarchical, centred, lines of command from central trunk). War Machine is rhizome (subterranean stem connecting any point to any other; acentered, non-hierarchical, multiplicitous; no beginning or end, only middle).

• Strategic logic — Chess vs Go: Chess is the State’s game (capture/destruction; hierarchical coded pieces with intrinsic properties and fixed movements; striated space; goal is capture of central sovereign king). Go is the War Machine’s game (anonymous equivalent pellets with situational/relational value; smooth space; surround and envelop; pure strategy and movement).

Pure De-territorialisation

Schmitt’s Partisan is ultimately a figure of re-territorialisation (struggle aimed at liberating/reclaiming striated space to found a new state form — fights for control of the map). The Nomad embodies pure de-territorialisation — perpetual production of smooth space and tracing of lines of flight evading all apparatuses of capture. The Nomad is the map, constantly redrawing it through movement.

The Mongol war machine as quintessential historical exemplar: success not from superior numbers but from unparalleled mobility, coordination, speed (mastery of dromology). Feigned retreat, rapid envelopment, broad-front advance — designed to actively produce a smooth battlespace rendering fixed fortifications and slow deliberate sedentary armies ineffective. The Nomad’s primary weapon is not the sword but the line of flight; de-territorialisation is fundamentally a psychological-social process of unmooring that precedes and enables physical action. The State captures not just bodies and goods but desire and thought; the War Machine’s first victory is to de-territorialise the minds and desires of its constituents before they ever move across physical space.

Aesthetics, Affect, and Dromology

The War Machine is also affective and aesthetic. Its essence is dromology (Paul Virilio’s logic of speed) — power as function of velocity, not mass. Operates through affect (active impersonal projectile-like discharge) rather than feeling (introceptive subjective retarded). Warrior’s “furor” is not irrational passion overwhelming reason but expression of pure becoming — immanent affirmative force of “desiring-production.”

Nomadic aesthetic of “free action” (abstract lines, non-functional weapon embellishment) contrasts with State’s aesthetic of “work” (gravity, utility, representation of transcendent order). Nomad’s violence is not Clausewitzian-instrumental; it is expressive — immanent manifestation of creative-destructive power. This ontological challenge — demonstration that another mode of existence is possible — is what makes the Nomad a figure of profound enduring threat.

Comparative Table — Partisan vs Nomad

Dimension	Schmitt’s Partisan	Deleuze-Guattari’s Nomad
Ontological status	Reactive figure born from state crisis	Primary force ontologically prior to state
Spatial logic	Re-territorialisation	Pure de-territorialisation
Spatial form	Striated space (defended/contested)	Smooth space (produced through movement)
Organisational form	Arborescent (sovereign-dependent)	Rhizome (acentered network)
Strategic game	Chess (capture, destroy)	Go (surround, envelop)
Anchor	Telluric (concrete soil)	Dromological (speed, line of flight)
Enmity mode	Real (telluric) → Absolute (motorised)	Expressive, immanent, pure becoming
Relation to sovereign	Dependent for political recognition	External; opposes apparatus of capture
Telos	Found new legal order	Evade all capture
Violence type	Political-instrumental (unless motorised)	Expressive-affirmative

Operational Mechanisms — Hybrid Reality

Real-world actors are rarely pure types; the most effective irregulars strategically combine partisan rootedness with nomadic mobility.

Viet Cong — The “Motorised Partisan”

Quintessential limit-case for Schmitt and bridge to nomadic concept:

• Telluric Partisan characteristics: war of national liberation against foreign invader (US) and illegitimate client regime (Saigon); profound rural-population-and-land integration; classic Partisan tactics (camouflage, blending, guerrilla, ambushes, tunnels).
• Motorised by universalist ideology: Marxism-Leninism framing as part of global absolute-enmity socialism-vs-imperialism conflict.
• Sovereign-dependent: state sponsor (North Vietnam) providing leadership, training, weapons, strategic direction (COSVN).
• Telos was total re-territorialisation: complete overthrow and re-striation of South Vietnam under unified Communist State apparatus — using irregular war-machine-like tactics not to escape the state but to become the state.

Al-Qaeda — The Global Rhizome

Quintessential nomadic War Machine on a global scale: deterritorialised rhizomatic network in smooth spaces of international finance, unregulated territories, internet. Primary strategic function is cognitive de-territorialisation — sophisticated propaganda unmooring individuals from national/cultural/local-religious identities and reterritorialising them onto abstract ideological territory of “global jihad.” Attacks are nomadic in character: projectile-like, spectacular, aimed at disrupting and demoralising the global State apparatus rather than conventional conquest.

ISIS — The Paradoxical Hybrid

Most complex evolution. Began as rhizomatic insurgency with nomadic speed-and-terror tactics, then performed shocking maneuver: used the war machine not to flee but to capture and hold territory, attempting to become a State. 2014–2019 intensive striation: bureaucracy, taxation, public services, currency, legal code — full state-building project. Hybrid par excellence — nomadic War Machine appropriating State-form. Internal contradiction: had to betray its own nomadic de-territorialising essence to achieve territorial state-building goals; tension managed through extreme violence and terror suppressing internal lines of flight. After military destruction of physical Caliphate, largely reverted to decentralised nomadic insurgency through clandestine cells and online networks — demonstrating strategic oscillation between poles.

Kurdish YPG / Rojava — The Ambiguous Figure

Defies easy categorisation, highlights combinatorial possibilities:

• Telluric Partisan characteristics: defensive, deeply rooted in specific Rojava land, fighting for protection of multi-ethnic communities against existential threats (ISIS, Turkey).
• Anti-statist deterritorialising ideology: Democratic Confederalism (Öcalan-derived, Murray Bookchin-influenced libertarian municipalism) — decentralised confederated grassroots democratic communes; explicitly rejects centralised hierarchical nation-state. Clear line of flight from traditional statecraft.
• Rhizomatic War Machine: speed, stealth, surprise, flexibility; democratic bottom-up organisation with elected officers and high operational autonomy.
• Partisan-like sovereign dependency: existence and military success critically dependent on US (airpower, arms, training, political backing).

True hybrid: telluric partisan-like defence force animated by nomadic deterritorialising ideology, functioning as autonomous war machine simultaneously dependent on a foreign State for survival. Hybridity is the new norm of irregular conflict.

From Enmity to Expenditure — Bataille and Agamben

Schmitt and Deleuze/Guattari illuminate strategic aims (political enmity, deterritorialising flows) but cannot account for two dimensions of contemporary irregular violence: its spectacular non-instrumental character, and its biopolitical impact on legal-biological status of targets.

Georges Bataille — The Logic of Sovereign Expenditure

In La Part maudite (The Accursed Share, 1949) Bataille radically inverts classical economics: the fundamental problem for any living system is not scarcity but management of excess energy. Every system produces a surplus (“accursed share”) that must be expended — productively (reinvestment) or unproductively (luxury, sacrifice, ecstatic ritual, war). Sovereignty is located in non-servile expenditure of the present moment — affirmation of freedom from the world of utility.

This provides a powerful lens for political violence opaque to traditional strategic analysis. Spectacular acts of terrorism without clear negotiable Clausewitzian “political” goal can be re-conceptualised as acts of sovereign expenditure. 9/11, on this reading, is not only an attempt to achieve specific policy changes but also a modern potlatch — violent glorious wasteful consumption of life and resources that is its own end. Radical rejection of bourgeois accumulation, utility, life-as-highest-good. Violence not as means to end but as sacred ecstatic terrifying end in itself — moment of sovereign affirmation through pure destruction. Introduces a third motivational logic beyond policy and flight: sovereign affirmation of pure non-utilitarian destruction.

Giorgio Agamben — State of Exception, Homo Sacer, Bare Life

Building on Schmitt and Foucault, Agamben provides critical tools for the legal-biopolitical status of the irregular combatant. By their nature, Partisan and Nomad blur fundamental distinctions of classical war law: combatant/civilian, war/peace, military/police. They drag the state fighting them into a “zone of indistinction” — a space where law is suspended. This is the state of exception (after Schmitt).

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Agamben argues the state of exception, once temporary emergency measure, has become the dominant paradigm of modern government. Within this zone the individual is stripped of political-legal status and reduced to homo sacer: “sacred man” — a figure of bare life, included in juridical order only through its exclusion. Life that can be killed by anyone with impunity yet whose death has no formal sacrificial value.

Indispensable for analysing post-9/11 Global War on Terror targeting: the irregular combatant, by refusing regular-soldier status, compels the liberal state to abandon justus hostis and adopt the state-of-exception logic. The drone strike is the ultimate biopolitical technology — administering death to figures reduced to bare life, in a deterritorialised permanent state of exception that knows no geographical bounds. Targets identified not as legitimate enemy combatants with rights under laws of war but as killable lives (“pattern of life” analysis, “disposition matrix”). Warfare transformed into global police action; targets into homines sacri. The irregular’s greatest victory in this sense is not military but political: forcing the liberal state to betray its own legal principles and reveal the hidden biopolitical foundation of sovereign power — the power to decide who lives and who can be killed.

Contemporary Applications

• Hybrid Warfare and Gray Zone — the canonical conceptual grammar for adversary classification within these frames.
• Cross-Theater-Imperatives — Engineered Instability deliberately produces conditions favouring nomadic-rhizomatic adversaries that the converged-battlespace doctrine struggles to engage.
• Gaza War — Hamas as hybrid (telluric-Partisan defending Gaza, but with absolute-enmity universalist religious-ideological framing edging into “motorised” mode); IDF response operating substantially in state-of-exception mode against population reduced toward bare-life status, illustrating Agamben’s contemporary diagnostic power.
• Sudan Civil War — RSF as hybrid quasi-state nomadic actor; ISIS-style oscillation between rhizomatic insurgency and territorial striation.
• Russian PMC ecosystem (Wagner / Africa Corps) — formally non-state but state-dependent; nomadic operationally, partisan-like in regime-survival contracting; see Shatterbelts-and-Gateways Sahel case.

Key Connections

• Carl von Clausewitz — the bracketed-warfare paradigm whose collapse produces the Partisan (and against whose Trinity the Nomad represents an ontological alternative)
• Cabinet-War-Paradigm — the jus publicum europaeum whose dissolution births the Partisan
• Cross-Theater-Imperatives — converged battlespace as the doctrine’s reaction to widespread hybrid irregular adversaries
• Strategic-Theory-Canonical-Survey — the canonical lineage including the Schmittian and post-structural strands
• Gray Zone
• Hybrid Warfare
• Cognitive Warfare and Algorithmic Disinformation — cognitive de-territorialisation as Al-Qaeda-style operational mode
• Russian Federation

Gap: vault currently lacks a dedicated note on Carl Schmitt at 06 Authors & Thinkers/Foundational Thinkers/Carl Schmitt.md. Recommend creation given Schmitt’s centrality to political theory, exception theory, and partisan analysis. Same gap for Deleuze-Guattari, Bataille, Agamben, Virilio, Foucault (a Foucault note exists; the others are absent).

Sources

• NEGISC source document: Partisan and Nomad Re-Analyzed (jun 2025), Part III, with Viet Cong / Al-Qaeda / ISIS / YPG case studies and the Bataille-Agamben metaphysical-biopolitical extension. Citations include ResearchGate, Telos Press, Cambridge Press, Cornell ARL, Purdue Deleuze archive, Stanford UP, Britannica, USAWC Parameters. Confidence: High as analytical synthesis with full apparatus.
• Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen: Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Duncker & Humblot, 1963; English: Telos Press, 2007). Confidence: High as primary source.
• Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (1932; The Concept of the Political, Chicago UP, 1996). Confidence: High for friend-enemy distinction.
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (Minuit, 1980; A Thousand Plateaus, Minnesota UP, 1987), especially “Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine.” Confidence: High as primary source.
• Georges Bataille, La Part maudite (Minuit, 1949; The Accursed Share, Zone Books, 1991). Confidence: High as primary source.
• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Einaudi, 1995; Stanford UP, 1998) and Stato di eccezione (Bollati Boringhieri, 2003; State of Exception, Chicago UP, 2005). Confidence: High as primary sources.
• Paul Virilio, Vitesse et politique (Galilée, 1977; Speed and Politics, Semiotext(e), 1986). Confidence: High for dromology.