The words terror and terrorism are used widely today and are used to denote an illegitimate act of violence. War, on the other hand is used as a more open concept, the legitimacy of every particular act is at least placed under limited debate. The issue of how our thoughts upon the legitimacy of violence are ordered by the framing of the legal concepts of terror and war is an important contemporary question. One way into this question is by giving (...) an account of Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘partisan war.’ Introducing Schmitt’s concept of the ‘partisan’ into Anglophone legal theory is the main aim of this paper. (shrink)