On May 28, 2026, the United States (U.S.) Department of State designated two criminal organizations in Brazil, Comando Vermelho (CV) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), as ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorists’ (SDGTs), while intending to supplement this action with their further designation as ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’ (FTOs). According to the U.S. Department of State, CV and PCC are ‘criminal organizations’ whose ‘illicit networks’ and activities extend far beyond Brazilian borders, across the region and into U.S. territory, thus justifying their designation not only as being foreign but also as global terrorists and terrorist organizations (United States Department of State 2026). The securitization (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998) action was taken by the Trump Administration in the name of the American people, aiming to protect the American nation and its national security interests against ‘violent narco-terrorists’ and ‘cartels and criminal organizations in our [American] region’ (United States Department of State 2026).
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A few weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva officially met at the White House, and a few days after Brazilian Senator and presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro was received by the American President at the Oval Office, the designation of CV and PCC as specially designated ‘global terrorists’ and ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ had various reverberations in Brazil and worldwide (BBC News 2026; Diniz 2026; Liy and Gortázar 2026; A Hora 2026; Foro de Teresina 2026; Café da Manhã 2026; Mena 2026). Not entirely a surprise (Foro de Teresina 2026; Lima 2026), though, the extraterritorial designation brought to Brazil what the Executive Order 14157, signed by Donald Trump on January 20, 2025, had already extraterritorially authorized in relation to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean in the name of ‘the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere’ (U.S. President 2025).
As a perceptive analyst has observed, the designation of international cartels and other transnational organizations as SDGTs and FTOs has not only broadened the scope for tougher extraterritorial responses by the U.S. in the region, thus triggering spectral memories of exceptionalism, interventionism and imperialism, but also involved a dispute over (inter)national security categories and a reframing of the fight against transnational crime within the grammar of terrorism (Lima 2026). In other words, it involved a most fundamental, imperial politics of language, naming, and deciding about the conceptual order within which concepts are (re)constructed and gain their meaning (Yamato 2020, 2024; Derrida 1988). In this article, inspired by a deconstructionist, post-foundational political thought (Marchart 2007; Yamato 2026), which is indissociable from a counter-colonial (Mohamedou 2017) ‘critique of imperialism’ (Spivak 1988, 311, footnote 49), I engage with such an extraterritorial politics of naming, conceptualizing, and framing involved in the U.S. designation of ‘global terrorists’ in Brazil. I argue that the Trump Administration is not only performatively (re)conceptualizing and (re)signifying the ‘terrorist’, as an individual concept, but is also (re)framing and (re)constructing the infrastructural grammar and conceptual order within which modern international legal-political concepts and categories (including ‘terrorism’ and ‘crime’, but also ‘security’, ‘enmity’, and ‘war’, among many others) gain their meaning. In so doing, I argue, Trump Administration (re)actualizes a particular, constitutive trope of the ‘modern international’ world (Walker 2010, 2016; Yamato 2026), the trope of the ‘outlaw of humanity’ and the absolute negation of the ‘constitutive outsider’ of the international, while legitimizing an imperial politics of outlawing and its accompanying exceptionalism and abject forms of violence in the region. In what follows, I offer a first, tentative reading of this imperial politics of naming, framing, and outlawing, aiming to problematize and rethink Trump Administration’s designation of (new) ‘global terrorists’ before a broader and infrastructural (conceptual and non-conceptual) spatiotemporal intertextuality (Shapiro 1989; Derrida 1988, 2016).
For this purpose, I take Carl Schmitt’s passage not only as an epigraph, but also as a – political and polemic – starting point. And an important caveat here is that Schmitt writes that passage in a piece published in 1933, the very year he joined the Nazi Party, aiming ‘to play the role of “Crown Jurist” of the Hitler regime’ (Bendersky 1987, 91; Nunan 2011). The piece was (tellingly) entitled Forms of modern imperialism in international law (Schmitt 2011a [1933]). The politico-polemical piece aimed at the (then) ‘most modern imperialism’, that is, the ‘imperialism of the United States of America’ (Schmitt 2011a [1933], 29). Schmitt is writing to the German people, insisting on the importance of ‘seeing through the veil of words and concepts’, while acknowledging ‘that concepts and forms of thinking’ are significant matters for political decision, and opposing the subordination to ‘the foreign vocabulary’ (Schmitt 2011a [1933], 45). Immediately before that passage of the epigraph above, he writes that ‘[i]t is one of the most important phenomena in the entire legal and intellectual life of humanity that whoever has real power is able to appropriate and determine concepts and words’ (Schmitt 2011a [1933], 44). Immediately after, he supplements that passage, affirming that ‘[i]mperialism forges for itself its own concepts’ (Schmitt 2011a [1933], 44). More specifically, imperialism involves the ‘capability to determine the content of political and legal concepts’ (Schmitt 2011a [1933], 44-45). For me, Schmitt is important here precisely because of his insistence on the most fundamental correlation between imperialism and the power to (re)appropriate and determine the content of words and concepts, forging for itself its own political and legal concepts, while redesigning the infrastructural international grammar and conceptual order. In my reading, Trump Administration’s designation of ‘global terrorists’ in Brazil aimed to enact precisely such a (re)appropriation of the (concept of the) ‘terrorist’, while redesigning the broader grammar(s) of terrorism, transnational crime and (inter)national security in the region. It was not only punctual, but also conceptually systemic and infrastructural. In other words, it was yet another imperial attempt to rule over the international legal-political grammar in Latin America and the Caribbean. Most foundationally, it was a performative act of worldmaking (Onuf 1989, 2018). Retrospectively, then, the 1933 Schmitt contributes for a better understanding of the infrastructural correlation between imperialism, words, concepts, grammar(s) and what he himself would name as the ‘nomos of the earth’ (Schmitt 2003) in 1950.
Moreover, this was the same Schmitt (2007a [1932]) who, one year earlier, had famously conceived the political in relation to the discrimination between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, while denouncing the polemical instrumentalization of ‘humanity’ for imperialist reasons in his The Concept of the Political. The same author who, a decade earlier, in his Political Theology, was already concerned with a certain sociological analysis of the systematic structure of secularized theological concepts, including ‘sovereignty’, the ‘exception’ (Schmitt 2005 [1922]), and other limit-concepts (Yamato 2019, 2020). It was the same author who, few years later, in his The Turn to the Discriminating Concept of War, would criticize the criminalization of ‘war’, most especially considering the position of the concept of ‘war’ within the conceptual system of international law (Schmitt 2011b [1937]). This was the very same Schmitt (2011c [1937]) who, in the same year, in the context of the 1937 Nyon Conference, fiercely opposed the English instrumentalization of ‘piracy’ and the ‘pirate’, and, hence, the criminalization of the public enemy, in his The Concept of Piracy. Schmitt (2003 [1950]), the author of The Nomos of the Earth, who (even if unintendedly) obsessively othered the ‘pirate’, while logocentrically mythologizing the ‘justus hostis’ as the most fundamental conceptual basis for a modern (European) international law. This was also the author of Theory of the Partisan, who offered in the 1960s an intermediate commentary on the concept of the political, conceptually engaging with the ‘partisan’, the ‘global revolutionary fighter’ and the ‘absolute enemy’ (Schmitt 2007b [1962]). The same Schmitt (1987) who, in his very last published piece, The Legal World Revolution, approvingly acknowledged Reinhart Koselleck’s differentiation between symmetric and asymmetric counterconcepts (Koselleck 2004), in order to critically (re-)engage with ‘humanity’ as a political subject. This Schmittian ‘arc’ suggests his long-term fascination with limit-concepts, the sociological analysis of the systematic structure of concepts, and their indissociable correlation to the conceptual order (and ordering) of the political world (Yamato 2019, 2020). Moreover, it suggests his long-term (polemic) opposition to the criminalization of enmity and war (Yamato 2019, 2020), drawing particular attention to the dehumanizing risks of confiscating ‘humanity’ and outlawing the enemy: ‘[t]o confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity’ (Schmitt 2007a [1932], 54).
Thus, following this Schmittian arc contributes not only for a better understanding of the infrastructural correlation between imperialism, words, concepts, grammar(s), worldmaking and the nomos of the earth, but also for a more critical, and post-foundational engagement with a constitute trope of the modern international world, that is, the asymmetric counterconceptual trope of the ‘outlaw of humanity’ (Yamato 2026, 295; see also Yamato 2011, 2019, 2020). At stake here is not only ‘enmity’ and ‘war’, but exceptional forms of othering and legitimizing abject forms of violence. As R. B. J. Walker (2016; see also 2010, 2018) has argued in his rethinking of the boundaries and sovereign practices of the international world, modern political life has been conditioned and expressed by two tropes that work in tandem but in two different spatiotemporal contexts: a spatial trope framed by the friend/enemy dualism, which characterized the political relations among sovereign states at the very hegemonic center of the modern (Christian-European) international law and society nostalgically celebrated by Schmitt (2003 [1950]); and a temporal trope framed by the civilized/uncivilized dualism, which applied at the margins of the society of states to those ‘coming into the international’ (Walker 2016, 79). In other words, borrowed from Edward Keene (2002), these tropes involved two different patterns of world ordering: while the former articulated a logic of toleration, the latter legitimized a logic of civilization. Borrowing from Walker (2010, 143) himself, I have suggested that a trope of absolute negation has always already supplemented the other two, while being mobilized against ‘those radically criminalized, outlawed and banned from modern international’s “humanity”’ (Yamato 2026, 295-296). Ontically, this trope has been associated with the international politics of outlawing, historically associated with the outlawed pirate, the enemy of humankind, and universal jurisdiction (Yamato 2011; Simpson 2007a, 2007b; Heller-Roazen 2009, 2011; Rech 2012). Ontopolitically, it has been articulated to the absolute spatiotemporal negation and to the constitutive outsides and outsiders of the international (Yamato 2019, 2020; Yamato and Bezerra, 2025). Negatively invoking ‘humanity’, it has ontic and ontopolitically legitimized a universal form of jurisdiction (Yamato 2011; Douzinas 2006; Macedo, 2006; Simpson 2007a, 2007b) and the performative declaration of the ‘outlaw of humanity’ (Schmitt 2007, 54; Yamato, Antunes and Ormond 2025).
In 2001, a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, Jacques Derrida (2003) was invited to a conversation with Giovanna Borradori. Reflecting on the role of philosophy before those events, Derrida intuitively advised for a critical reflection on the most fundamental conceptual assumptions of political philosophy. And, for him, a good starting point would be a critical re-reading of Schmitt and his different conceptions of enmity and war, since the violence then unleashed could not be appropriately captured by the traditional concept of ‘war’ (Derrida 2003, 100–101). John Yoo (2005), one of the legal architects of the ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ and its international exceptionalism in the context of U.S. “war on terror” (Yoo and Delabunty 2005), had a paradigmatic, ontic and ontopolitical example (Agamben 1998) in mind. For him, if you were an ‘illegal combatant’, just as ‘pirates’ historically (and structurally), you did not deserve the protection of the laws of war (Yoo apud Mayer 2005, 7-8; see also Yoo 2005). As Carlo Galli (2015, 106) has observed, Schmitt had already understood in the 1930s that the ‘pirate’ could be polemically invoked to criminalize the ‘enemy’, that is, in order to (re)construct the latter as ‘an irregular figure who could be criminalized as the enemy of all humanity’. Indeed, for Galli (2010, 184), making sense of ‘global war’ today requires returning to the historical model of the ‘wars against pirates’. After all, like pirates, contemporary terrorists are characterized as ‘hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race’ (Galli 2010, 185). In this regard, as Amedeo Policante (2015, 202) has perceptively observed, Yoo has reinforced the outlaws’ correlation and analogy few years ago, inviting the then U.S. President Barack Obama to ‘declare terrorists “enemies of mankind”’ after a CIA drone strike killed fifteen suspected terrorists. In Schmittian, chilling terms, this asymmetric form of enmity would not involve war, but rather ‘social pest control’ (Ulmen 2007, 105; Schmitt 2003 [1950], 123-124).
Twenty-five years after that September 11, Trump administration’s boat strikes against ‘narcoterrorists’ in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea (The Guardian 2026) reactualize the ‘outlaw of humanity’ trope in the Latin American and Caribbean region, legitimizing exceptional forms of violence and numerous targeted killings. Since September 2025, when the U.S. military began targeting ‘narcoterrorists’, more than 200 people have already been targeted and summarily killed in boat strikes (The Guardian 2026). Unfortunately, this is not really a complete surprise, considering the persistence of the U.S. “wars on terrors” (Ormond 2024), the Schmittian specters in the contemporary world and the various traces of the ‘outlaw of humanity’ in key memoranda and executive orders issued by different U.S. administrations from 2002 to 2025 (Yamato, Antunes and Ormond 2025). Indeed, there were (much) older, intertextual (Shapiro 1989) traces. As British historian Paul Johnson (2001) unapologetically argued only a few weeks after September 11 attacks, the nearest historical parallel to the “war on terror” was the American ‘war against piracy in the 19th century’. According to him, it was the young U.S. that had led this first war against ‘international outlaws (most civilised states accepted the old Roman law definition of pirates as “enemies of the human race”)’, which, crucially for his (neo)colonial argument, had been ‘an important element in the expansion of colonialism’ (Johnson 2001). If, ontic and historically, the war against those ‘“enemies of the human race”’ legitimized the U.S. colonialism in the region, then, structurally, Johnson’s (2001) unapologetic, ontopolitical point was that colonialism was (again) the answer to terrorism. Spectrally, Johnson (2001) echoed the U.S. colonialism, or ‘imperialism’, which Schmitt (2011a [1933]) once associated with the Monroe Doctrine and its accompanying ‘new international legal principle of legitimacy’, while polemically opposing them in 1933. Today, their specters reverberate in Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” (Nicas 2025; Oliva 2025), ‘narcoterrorists’, and new Brazilian ‘terrorists’.
Moreover, as Mohammad Mohamedou (2017) has fiercely denounced, Johnson’s was part of a broader, unapologetic call for ‘the return of colonialism’, a disturbing sign of the times involving both a debrutalisation of colonialism and a logic of imagining new forms of dispossession, which were (and continue to be) indissociable from (neo)fascistic tendencies and a (neo)colonial reasoning that legitimized (and continue to legitimize) the practice of extraterritorial drone killing, while normalizing the imperial rationalization of disciplining certain ‘“savage” lands’ in the context of the persistent U.S. “wars on terrors” (Ormond 2024). For instance, as Daniel Heller-Roazen (2009) and Amedeo Policante (2015) have critically shown, the ‘pirate’ (constructed as the ‘enemy of all’, ‘international outlaw’ and/or ‘enemy of the human race’) has a much longer (polemical) history and a close relationship with empire(s). Systemically, the limit-concept of the ‘pirate’ has a counterconceptual, structuring and legitimizing relationship with (neo)colonial, imperial, and asymmetric ontopolitical formations and exceptional forms of violence (Yamato 2019, 2020, 2026; Yamato and Bezerra 2025). Thus, in extraterritorially outlawing the (new) ‘terrorist’ in Brazil, the U.S. under Trump Administration is not only actualizing the ‘pirate’ and the trope of the ‘outlaw of humanity’ today, but also infrastructurally enacting its own legal and ontopolitical grammar and conceptual order, while negatively legitimizing its particular, (neo)colonial version of the international’s empire (Walker 2010, 2016; Bartelson 2023) in the Latin American and Caribbean region.
According to Mohamedou (2017), these (neo)fascistic, (neo)colonial and imperial forms of reasoning and legitimation of violence should be met and opposed by ‘a contra logic’, a post-post-colonial response, that is, a ‘counter-colonialism’. I could not agree more. In this article, I aimed to articulate, even if tentatively, a first response to Mohamedou’s counter-colonial call. Echoing Gayatri Spivak’s supplementary acknowledgement, that ‘the critique of imperialism is deconstruction as such’ (1988, 311, footnote 49), I followed Derrida’s intuitive advisement after September 11, 2001 (Derrida 2003), (re)engaging with Schmitt’s international political thought and conceptual order (and ordering) of enmity, war and the political, in order to problematize, rethink and respond to Trump Administration’s designation of CV and PCC as ‘global terrorists’ in Brazil. My point here is that there is much more going on with-in this American, extraterritorial performative act of securitization. Adopting a counter-colonial and anti-imperial, deconstructionist ‘position’ (Derrida 1981), which (re)engaged with Schmitt as an starting point for a better understanding of the infrastructural correlation between imperialism, the politics of naming and conceptualizing, grammar(s) and conceptual order(s), and the trope of the ‘outlaw of humanity’, I suggest that the American designation of ‘global terrorists’ not only (re)enacts an imperial politics of outlawing, thus (auto-)authorizing exceptional forms of othering and legitimizing abject forms of violence, but also negatively normalizes its own brutalist, (neo)colonial, and (neo)fascistic politics of worldmaking in (and from) the Americas.
Afterword
Writing from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, few days after the most inspiring, democratic (re)election of Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – a.k.a., Lula –, I echo Mohamedou, Spivak, Derrida, and others, including those millions of people involved in “Exército do Lula” (“Lula’s Army”), in Brazil and abroad, reaffirming a counter-colonial, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and counter-imperial deconstructionist position, which must always already resist to and oppose old and new, (re)actualized forms of imperial politics of outlawing, while striving for an-other, anti-totalitarian, contra-hegemonic, multilateral and pluriversal politics of worldmaking.
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Roberto Vilchez Yamato is Associate Professor of the Institute of International Relations at PUC-Rio. He is a CNPq Productivity Research Fellow and FAPERJ “Cientista do Nosso Estado” awardee. He holds a PhD in International Relations from PUC-Rio and a PhD in Law from Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Deconstructing the Interdisciplinary Study of International Law and International Relations, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2026. His research interests include deconstruction, postcolonial and decolonial thinking, international political thought and philosophy, critical international legal thinking, critical IR theories, and international political sociology.
Editorial Credit: Konstantina Oikonomou