The partisan (Schmitt)
A kind of irregular fighter marked out by four traits: no uniform and no place in a state's chain of command, high mobility, intense political commitment, and a rootedness in the particular ground being defended. The last trait — fighting for a piece of land that is literally one's own — is what separates this figure from the paid mercenary. Because the partisan represents neither a state nor a purely private interest, the classical law of war between states has no clear category for it.
In Carl Schmitt's late thought, the partisan is a particular kind of irregular combatant defined by four features: irregular status (not in uniform, not in a chain of state command), heightened mobility, intense political commitment, and a telluric attachment — a literal rootedness in the earth of a particular place that the partisan is defending. The figure stands outside the classical state-on-state law of war and forces a rethinking of the categories that law assumes.
Etymology§
From Italian partigiano, "of a party," via the resistance against Napoleonic occupation in Spain (the guerrilleros) and the anti-fascist resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia. Schmitt borrows the term in Theorie des Partisanen (1963) and gives it the philosophical weight it carries in the chartered-violence literature.
Schmitt's partisan is the conceptual hinge between two regimes of warfare: the Westphalian state-on-state order with its uniformed combatants and mutual recognition, and the older — and now resurgent — order in which violence is plural, irregular, and politically saturated. The partisan cannot be assimilated into the law-of-war categories Westphalia produced, because the partisan does not represent a state and does not fight under its insignia, but is also not a private individual pursuing private ends.
The telluric attachment is what distinguishes the Schmittian partisan from the modern mercenary: the partisan fights for a piece of land that is literally the partisan's, not for a paycheck. That distinction matters for reading the Ukrainian private air-defence operators of the late 2020s, who sit closer to Schmitt's category than to the McFate / PMC category — they are defending their own ports and warehouses, not deploying abroad.
Schmitt himself was a Nazi jurist, and the Theory of the Partisan was written in the early 1960s as part of his post-war intellectual rehabilitation; the figure of the partisan is, for him, a way of thinking about Mao and the Vietnam conflict, but also a way of working out the categories he had used during the Reich. The text is best read with that biographical context held in view.