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FrancoAngeli Journals

Papers

No. 3 (2025)

Hamas and Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the partisan. Geopolitics of the conflict in Gaza

  • Alessandro Ricci
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/rgioa3-2025oa19486
Submitted
ottobre 2, 2025
Published
2025-10-24

Abstract

The Gaza conflict, which erupted following the terrorist attacks of October 7 2023, is increasingly taking shape as an “asymmetric” or unequal war between the regular Israeli army and Hamas. Although Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by NATO member States, by Israel and Japan, the group displays peculiar characteristics that align with the political – and geopolitical – categories identified by Carl Schmitt in his 1963 book Theory of the Partisan. In this treatise, the German theorist, starting from an analysis of new war scenarios and the crisis of the State in the international arena, highlights the elements that have historically characterized partisan formations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, giving particular emphasis – among other aspects – on the geographic factor. Building on Schmitt’s theoretical and epistemological framework, and drawing on the geographical literature already existing on this topic, this paper aims to place Hamas and the Gaza conflict within a critical interpretive framework that has not yet been developed in the literature, and that could contribute to a better understanding of its nature while potentially reshaping how military intervention in the Near Eastern theatre is approached.

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