Simon Gros

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Petar Bojanić’s lecture intervenes in a persistent fault-line of modern practical philosophy: the way juridical language, political theology, and strategic reasoning converge upon a figure—the “unjust enemy”—that promises to secure peace by authorizing destruction. Its distinctive scholarly contribution lies in a reconstruction that is simultaneously genealogical and diagnostic: it treats hostis iniustus less as a stable concept than as an institutional operator that produces unity (the “all against one”) by manufacturing an exteriority, thereby revealing the term “enemy” as substantively incomplete and operationally volatile. Bojanić’s stake is to show, from within Kant’s own argumentative ecology and its juristic prehistory, how the rhetoric of symmetry in war is structurally undermined by the asymmetric logic of moralized hostility.

The lecture begins under an explicitly contextual outer frame: the moderator’s brief remarks locate the talk inside a renewed European discussion of hostis and hostis iniustus, recalling an earlier German debate and implying that the conference’s thematic pair, war and peace after Kant, is being revisited under contemporary pressures. This framing is not ornamental. It preselects the method Bojanić will perform: an improvisational reopening of what he repeatedly calls an “institution,” something at once conceptual and practical, simultaneously a doctrinal inheritance and a living administrative technique. He avows, almost programmatically, that he lacks “a good argument” in advance, while also confessing that he has been “doing one and the same thing for over 20 years.” The confession carries methodological weight. It marks the talk as a continuation in a long composition sequence: thesis-work, repeated returns, archival investigations, and now a conference improvisation. The result is a piece whose unity is achieved less by linear exposition than by recurrent re-entry into the same problem from shifting angles, each angle displacing the previous one without canceling it.

He opens with contemporary cases, and this choice functions as an epistemic provocation. Hamas appears as an immediately recognizable candidate for hostis iniustus, though Bojanić carefully stresses its dispersed character: “not group,” he says, then corrects himself, calling it a dispersed grouping across different groups. The hesitation is revealing: the category “unjust enemy” is presented from the start as attached to entities that strain the classical grammar of war—non-state, networked, partially clandestine. What matters for his initial demonstration is the perceived ease with which a public consensus can affirm the necessity of destruction, while simultaneously registering anxiety over civilians, collateral damage, and destruction as such. The “unjust enemy” thus emerges first as a structure of consent: a moralized target that seems to settle the question of permissibility while leaving open, in practice, the most ethically decisive question, namely what “destroy” could mean when the target is neither simply an army nor simply an idea.

From there he shifts to a second case—Serbia in the 1990s—explicitly described as, in Germany’s political-legal discourse, an unjust enemy “on one way or another.” Here the lecture introduces a motif that will return as a hinge: the “moment” of a continental or international consensus in which “different players” accept being “all against one.” Bojanić claims that this is the heart of the justificatory structure: a coalition produces its own moral-political self-description by positioning one actor as the unjust enemy. Behind this, he says, is “Kelsen,” invoked as the thinker who promotes the “all against one” logic and provides a juridical grammar in which such consensus can appear as justified. The talk does not develop Kelsen doctrinally; rather, the name functions as a signpost for the transformation of moral indignation into legal form, and for the conversion of plurality into unity through the identification of an exception.

At this point the lecture expands the lexicon of hostility—Taliban, terrorists, war criminal, criminal freedom fighter, “unblemished” freedom fighter, subversive—and the proliferation is itself an argument. It shows that the classificatory apparatus is unstable and that “enemy” language works through substitutable labels that all point toward “wrongful acts,” “bad acts,” “evil acts.” The question becomes methodological: how does one recognize the unjust enemy across this shifting vocabulary? Bojanić’s answer is initially genealogical and, importantly, deflationary with respect to canonical modern authors. He claims that key twentieth-century treatments (he mentions “Schmid,” clearly referring to Schmitt, and “C,” used throughout the transcript as a compressed reference-point) are fundamentally compilatory. Their apparent originality dissolves when one checks the canon: earlier jurists already contain the same institute, the same etymologies, the same argumentative moves. He names, in rapid sequence, a tradition that includes Gentili, Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and others, and he stresses the ease of verification: the canon libraries already held “everything.” The point is not pedantic source-criticism. It supports a deeper contention: the “institution” of the unjust enemy is older than any single theorist and gains its power from repeatability rather than conceptual refinement. Its force is archival, transmissible, and readily reactivated under new conditions.

The archive motif becomes concrete when Bojanić recounts work in Schmitt’s archive: manuscripts, etymological checking across languages, preparatory labor. He then abruptly brings this into the present with a remark about contemporary automated retrieval: “ask co-pilot or GPT.” The rhetorical effect is double. It demotes the aura of the great theorist by implying that compilation can be mechanized, and it also suggests that the institution’s endurance is tied to its retrievability: the unjust enemy is the kind of figure that a system of citation, excerpt, and recombination readily generates. Genealogy, in this telling, is not merely a history of ideas; it is a theory of how institutions reproduce themselves through textual economies of borrowing and reassembly.

Having relativized Schmitt and other modern appropriators, Bojanić introduces a distinction that becomes one of the lecture’s central tensions: “in concetto” versus “in concreto.” He says Schmitt insists on asking who the unjust enemy is “in concreto,” and he illustrates how easily this yields determinate targets. Kant’s concrete enemies are named: Poland and Turkey. Kant’s reason for Poland is described in socio-political terms: absence of a middle class, incapacity to make a constitution, incapacity to be a state, thus making destruction appear “great.” Turkey is described as outside Europe, positioned against Europe. The lecture does not pause to defend the historical accuracy beyond citing manuscript evidence; what matters is the exposure of a mechanism: abstract criteria slide into concrete identifications that are saturated with civilizational judgment. The institution’s claim to juridical rationality thus carries a latent anthropology and a geopolitics of inclusion and exclusion.

From here Bojanić makes one of his most provocative claims: he calls Kant a realist and attributes to the institution of unjust enemy a “huge capacity for peace.” He then announces a personal divergence from Schmitt: he “doesn’t care” for Schmitt’s celebration of enemy and war, and he calls “enemy” a “stupid term,” declaring that it does not exist today, that only the unjust enemy exists. In the same breath he offers an illustrative example: enmity between France and Germany is now empty, “nothing.” This is not a casual remark; it is an attempt to redescribe modern political space. Classical interstate enmity loses salience, while moralized, criminalized, or terrorist-coded hostility becomes the dominant mode through which conflict is recognized. The lecture thereby proposes a transformation in the ontology of political antagonism: the modern world contains fewer “enemies” in the symmetrical sense and more targets presented as unjust, criminal, or monstrous, thereby inviting forms of action that exceed reciprocal war.

This transformation sets up the lecture’s next displacement: the conference theme appears to privilege peace, yet Bojanić insists that war is more interesting in Kant, because it allows one to trace how Kant arranges arguments across lectures and fragments. The focus shifts from the famous peace text to a wider compositional field: Kant wrote about war before and after, and the peace piece becomes an intermezzo, “practically nothing” when isolated from the surrounding justificatory material. This is a compositional claim with philosophical consequences. If peace is framed as an institutional task inside a world where war remains structurally present, then peace cannot be understood as a simple negation of war; it becomes a technique of managing, channeling, and juridifying violence. Bojanić emphasizes preventive war and preemptive attack as “most important” in Kant’s treatment. The reference to “Bush” and the “fight against terrorism” is not developed empirically; it functions as a contemporary resonance that shows how Kantian justificatory structures can be reactivated under modern strategic doctrines.

At the conceptual center of this section lies a philological and semantic insistence on the term rendered in the transcript as “geted V,” presented as crucial to the idea of guaranteeing or instituting peace. Bojanić argues that the English sense of “guarantee” misses the institutional force: peace requires more than promising restraint; it requires an act or arrangement that produces an enduring structure. This is where the lecture’s distinctive conceptual style appears most clearly: it treats institutionalization as a form of measured violence, a transformation of violence into right, justice, law. Kant is placed within a “huge tradition” that holds that one needs violence to do something—to make law out of the rawness of conflict. Bojanić’s phrase suggests a quasi-alchemical process: aggression is not simply eliminated; it is transposed, constrained, and re-coded. The institution of peace, on this reading, is a work of conversion rather than pacification.

This conversion is then dramatized through an unexpected compositional linkage: Kant’s peace reflections are placed alongside his contemporaneous interest in Hufeland’s work on prolonging life. Bojanić draws an analogy to Hegel’s relation to Hahnemann and homeopathy, implying a broader philosophical pattern: political therapeutics borrow their imagery from medical therapeutics. Vaccination becomes the guiding metaphor. It embodies the idea that a controlled dose of harm can produce health. Kant’s example of drinking bad-tasting tea is used to illustrate a voluntary, measured violence undertaken for restoration. The conceptual yield is significant: the lecture suggests that Kant’s institutional imagination of peace shares a logic with immunological thinking. To institute peace means to administer violence in the right dose, at the right time, through the right channels, so that the body politic can regain coherence. This argument also shifts the meaning of “preventive” from merely strategic to quasi-therapeutic: prevention appears as a practice of inoculation against future harm.

Yet the lecture also refuses any comforting resolution. Immediately after the therapeutic motif, Bojanić warns against celebrating Schmittian enemy-concepts and state harmonization. He brings in drones as a sign of the future of war: drones are “instruments” of destruction, and “if we destroy the drone, there’s nothing,” because the drone is nothing but a means. The implication is methodological and ethical: modern violence tends to present itself as pure instrumentality, as a technical operation detached from the thick moral language in which “enemy” used to be embedded. At the same time, the ease of targeting enhances the temptation to treat destruction as an efficient administrative function. The institution of unjust enemy then becomes the moral shell that can be wrapped around technological capacity, enabling “effective destruction” to appear as justified.

The lecture then approaches what it implicitly treats as a textual pivot: the passage about a League of Nations, framed “in accordance with the idea of an original social contract,” necessary to protect against attacks “from without,” while refraining from meddling in internal dissensions. Bojanić fastens on the word “without” as a problem. The League is imagined as a unity that requires an exterior threat, yet if “all of us are together,” who remains outside? The lecture reports that commentators (Natorp and others) read the “without” as a mistake, and Bojanić turns the mistake into a conceptual symptom. Modern political unity, on this reading, requires the production of an outside, and the unjust enemy becomes the name for that outside. Even when unity is imagined as comprehensive, the logic of security demands an exteriority through which unity can recognize itself. “Outside,” he says, is “the place for the appearance of” the unjust enemy. The institution thus has a transcendental function in the practical sphere: it supplies the condition under which a collective can experience itself as a collective.

This is the point at which Bojanić’s earlier deflation of “enemy” becomes more determinate. He urges forgetting Schmitt’s critique and forgetting the term enemy, because contemporary conflict is no longer organized primarily as “wars of prestige,” “wars of choice,” or colonial wars in the classical sense. He cites Russell’s “Ethics of War,” recalling a classification in which colonial wars were deemed justified, and he treats this as an “all-timer” symptom of the persistence of justificatory typologies. The lecture’s key assertion here is that the latent existence of the unjust enemy in international power relations becomes the remaining capacity for justifying war, and thereby the remaining support for the idea of just wars in general. If attack wars are forbidden, then the juridical imagination shifts its justificatory burden onto the identification of an unjust enemy. “We don’t care for enemy,” he says, and even “aggressor” becomes secondary; what matters is the ability to designate someone as unjust in a manner that authorizes force while preserving the appearance of legality.

The discourse then intensifies through a set of figures: Vattel calls the unjust enemy a “monster”; Schmitt, in one version of his critique, speaks of the opponent as a criminal, a “mad dog,” someone whose destruction is justified. Bojanić links these rhetorics to the pirate: hostis humani generis, the enemy of humankind, the non-state figure whose very existence can unify the world. Pirates, as dispersed groups, possess the peculiar capacity to bring states together by providing a shared target. Here the lecture touches, briefly but decisively, an Agambenian resonance through “homo sacer,” though Bojanić treats it less as a developed theoretical apparatus than as a shorthand for the legal-existential condition of one who falls outside protection. The unjust enemy, in this register, approaches a threshold where the target is described as less than human, a monster, a mad dog, a being whose destruction appears as hygiene. Bojanić emphasizes secrecy as a trait: the unjust enemy “does something secretly,” and he connects this again to Hamas. He also advances a further criterion drawn from Vattel: the unjust enemy is incapable of forming a proper political group, incapable of organizing on “good grounds.” This inability to form legitimate association becomes part of the justification for treating the target as outside the public order.

At the lecture’s first apparent closure, Bojanić ends with a remark that those who wage war for pleasure have no goal and no country, and the moderator thanks him. The applause marks the end of the initial composition. Yet the talk’s philosophical work continues in the Q&A, which functions as an inner dialectic that forces the lecture to confront its own volatile implications. The first question presses preventive war through the historical analogy of 1938, asking whether Kant “has a point.” Bojanić answers by citing Kant’s own oscillation: one must wait until the intention to injure is manifested, and yet if one recognizes preparations for harm, one has a right of prevention. He insists that this is widespread in public law and “nothing original,” and he introduces a post-9/11 debate through a name rendered as “Hillary Patam,” who argues against such war because the harm is uncertain until manifested. Bojanić contrasts this with Kant’s position as “absolutely different” and adds a mundane anthropological claim: “we are doing this all the time in our life.” The everyday analogy is not trivial. It supplies a phenomenological warrant for preventive logic: human agents routinely act on recognized preparations, not merely on completed attacks. The question that remains suspended is whether everyday prudence can legitimately scale to international violence without reproducing a logic of indefinite suspicion.

The next question drives directly into that danger. It asks what “destroying” a just or unjust enemy amounts to, distinguishing dismantling military capacity from destroying an idea, and warning that the attempt to destroy an ideology risks limitless annihilation, given that the accusation of injustice almost always has an ideological component. This intervention compels the lecture to re-enter the most ethically charged zone: the relation between conceptual designation and material practice. Bojanić’s response is strikingly practical. He acknowledges the mixing of reality, ideas, arguments, justification, and admits the difficulty. He then returns to the “all against one” idea, tracing it to a source named “Fred GR,” described as a French tractatus about unification through identifying who is against. The image of children setting traps to see what happens implies that the procedure is both primitive and perennial: a collective tests for deviance and consolidates itself through exposure. On destruction, Bojanić invokes his current project on victory and his comparison of war ethics codices in the Israeli army, insisting that it is possible to clarify what “destroy” means in terms of targets, thresholds, and criteria for victory. He separates, rhetorically, military prudence from political mania, saying armies are often more prudent than politicians, and that military sectors are “arranged” to avoid stupidity. The conceptual work of this response is ambiguous. On the one hand, it suggests that institutional constraints can limit annihilatory drift. On the other hand, it grounds restraint in professional administration rather than in a transformed concept of enemy. The questioner’s worry about ideological destruction remains, and Bojanić replies by emphasizing technological trajectory: targeting will become easier, isolation and recognition of targets more precise. He defines the ethics of war as the history of when one has permission to kill and how one can kill. In this definition, the unjust enemy concept appears less as a moral safeguard than as an operator that interacts with evolving capacities of killing.

A further question introduces distinctions from legal theory: “mere enemy,” enemy criminal law, reduced status, residual protections under international law such as prohibitions on torture and the Geneva Convention. It asks whether Kant is part of the problem or part of the solution. Bojanić’s answer is one of the lecture’s sharpest moments of conceptual instability. He suggests forgetting hostis iniustus and putting “just enemy” in its place, then says one could solve the problem by forgetting the institution of “inus” and just putting “enemy,” because with enemy everything becomes clear. He then recalls a formulation: an enemy is someone who wants to destroy, and one does not choose one’s enemy; the enemy chooses. This framing shifts agency: hostility becomes something imposed rather than selected, something that seizes the subject. He then says that cosmetic adjustment of Kant’s institution could promote it as positive, and immediately adds uncertainty about whether we are living in a Schmittian dream-world. He proposes that today’s problems are not other states, migrants, or strangers, but terrorists and people who want to do something improper. In that case, he declares he will protect or justify the institution of unjust enemy: “beautiful idea.” The oscillation is not merely rhetorical inconsistency; it expresses the lecture’s core tension. The concept that promises clarity also promises overreach. The term “enemy” appears too blunt and historically compromised, while “unjust enemy” appears more exact and contemporary, yet it risks producing the very limitless violence it seeks to regulate.

The final question explicitly notes this confusion and then articulates an interpretive synthesis: Kant is a realist, states exist in a state of nature, right and wrong are difficult to articulate at that level, the only general limit is waging war in a way that preserves the possibility of peace, and the unjust enemy becomes the needed additional delimiter that constitutes the unity of those who abide by rules of war through exclusion of one. The questioner underscores the danger: under Kant’s description, anyone can be declared unjust. Bojanić accepts the diagnosis: potentially, yes. He then introduces the practical condition that matters for him: consensus. If consensus is the most important thing—if “we are together decided who is the enemy”—then there is “no problem.” He gestures toward the notorious instability of distinctions like freedom fighter versus terrorist, acknowledging them as the usual comparison. He then shifts to an “empirical” question—why Serbia?—and replies that it was a “moment,” a chaos, a necessity to intervene. He refuses to rehearse consequences, calling that a different story. He closes with an admonition about reading: the problem lies in reading bad texts; one should read Gentili rather than Schmitt, because Gentili provides pages and pages of differentiated enemy-characteristics and an Oxford edition makes it accessible. The applause closes the outer frame, and the lecture ends by converting its own improvisation into a bibliographic directive: the conceptual institution must be studied in its deeper juristic strata rather than in twentieth-century celebratory polemics.

Taken as a whole, the lecture’s composition sequence—contemporary exemplification, genealogical deflation, Kantian reconstruction, therapeutic analogy, institutional pivot on “without,” and the Q&A dialectic—performs the very phenomenon it analyzes: unity is repeatedly sought through designation, and each designation produces an outside that returns as a problem. The “unjust enemy” operates as an instrument of institutional peace insofar as it enables collective coordination against violence, yet it also operates as a generator of moralized asymmetry that can erode the reciprocal constraints of war. Bojanić’s most enduring insight is that the term “enemy” lacks substantive completeness precisely because, in modern conditions, it is increasingly replaced by criminal, monstrous, clandestine, and ideological predicates that transform war’s grammar into a policing grammar. His most consequential warning remains implicit rather than pronounced: once peace is imagined as an institutional achievement that requires measured violence, the difference between inoculation and extermination becomes a matter of administration, consensus, and technological capacity. The lecture clarifies that Kant’s legacy here cannot be rendered as a simple program for peace; it must be read as a complex apparatus in which the production of an outside, the juridification of force, and the moralization of hostility form a single problem-field whose internal tensions remain active in contemporary war talk.

The lecture’s internal logic becomes clearer once one treats its recurring claims as attempts to stabilize three simultaneously moving boundaries: the boundary between juridical description and moral intensification, the boundary between interstate war and policing operations, and the boundary between an enemy as a participant in a relation of reciprocity and an enemy as a locus of impurity that must be removed. Bojanić’s improvisational method repeatedly crosses and re-crosses these lines, and the crossings are themselves evidentiary. The talk does not proceed as an exegesis of Kant, and it does not proceed as a purely contemporary diagnosis. It proceeds as a sequence of recontextualizations in which Kant functions as an axis around which older juristic sediments and newer security practices rotate, generating a field where “enemy” words are less designations of a stable adversary than instruments for forming coalitions, authorizing violence, and distributing legal statuses.

One can see this instrumentality already in the lecture’s earliest moves. Hamas is introduced almost as a “natural experiment” in contemporary public reasoning: a dispersed, partially clandestine adversary, widely treated as eligible for destruction. Bojanić’s emphasis on the ease of consensus is not merely sociological; it raises a question about the epistemic minimum required for annihilatory authorization. The category hostis iniustus seems to offer a shortcut: it converts a complex conflict into a moralized object whose destruction appears to entail peace. Yet the talk immediately registers the counter-pressure: civilians, collateral damage, destruction’s spread. This early juxtaposition produces a guiding tension that the lecture does not dissolve: the moral clarity promised by the unjust enemy concept tends to coexist with indeterminacy about what, concretely, must be done, and this indeterminacy is structurally dangerous when the authorized means are lethal and scalable.

The move to Serbia in the 1990s then functions as a bridge between “dispersed group” cases and state cases. Bojanić’s point is less about Serbia as such than about the form of justification: a plurality of actors on an international scene accepts being “all against one,” and this acceptance supplies an apparently juridical consent to extraordinary measures. The lecture’s recurring insistence that “all against one” lies behind the unjust enemy concept matters because it identifies the concept’s function: it is a coalition-forming operator. By naming an unjust enemy, one does not simply classify an adversary; one produces a unity among those who name. This unity is not a mere aggregate of interests. It adopts an ethical self-image: an “alliance of all against evil,” the phrase evoked in the short description and implicitly enacted in the lecture’s examples. The consequence is that the justificatory burden shifts. The coalition need not show that its violence is symmetrical and reciprocally constrained; it needs to show that it stands on the side of order against a figure that dissolves order.

This is why Bojanić’s proliferation of labels—terrorist, war criminal, subversive, freedom fighter in various moral conditions—has a methodological role. It shows that the unjust enemy concept does not operate as a neutral descriptor attached to determinate acts. It operates inside a regime of naming that is itself contested. The lecture thereby suggests that the unjust enemy is often “recognized” through a rhetorical economy rather than through a strictly legal procedure. Recognition is made plausible by a cluster of morally loaded predicates: secrecy, dispersion, pleasure in war, incapacity to form legitimate association, ideological corruption. The legal name hostis iniustus becomes the point at which these predicates can congeal into an actionable conclusion. The lecture’s deflationary genealogy then intensifies this claim. If Schmitt and other modern authorities are mainly compiling earlier jurists, then the concept’s force does not come from philosophical sophistication. It comes from its availability as a ready-made institutional device, portable across epochs and easily reactivated when conditions call for unity-through-exclusion.

Bojanić’s archival anecdote about Schmitt’s etymological labor is instructive here because it reveals that even the most influential modern theorist appears as a worker within a textual machinery. The lecture’s aside about asking contemporary retrieval systems is, in this context, more than a joke. It implies that the unjust enemy concept belongs to a family of ideas that travel well precisely because they are made of recombinable fragments. They have a syntax that encourages citation and restatement: pirates unify the world; monsters are outside law; the alliance of all against evil secures peace; preemption is justified by preparation; peace requires institution. Each fragment can be lifted, inserted, and made to function as a warrant. The lecture thereby treats the genealogy of the unjust enemy as a genealogy of justificatory templates.

The concetto/concreto distinction then gives this template-structure a concrete danger. “In concetto,” the unjust enemy is easy to define: a violator of public order, a breaker of the rules that make peace possible, an aggressor against humanity’s minimal conditions. “In concreto,” determinate populations, states, religions, and regions become candidates. Bojanić’s examples—Poland and Turkey in Kant’s manuscripts—show how quickly the abstract criteria absorb anthropological judgments. The declared incapacity for constitution-making, the lack of a middle class, the civilizational “outside” of Europe: these are not strictly juridical criteria. They are civilizational diagnostics converted into grounds for destruction. The lecture does not fully elaborate this conversion, yet it depends upon it. Kant’s “realism,” as Bojanić calls it, emerges as a realism of institutional formation: peace is a project in a world where states remain in a quasi-natural condition, yet the path toward peace is shaped by assessments of who can belong to the peace-forming order. The unjust enemy figure is the negative imprint of that belonging.

When Bojanić declares that “enemy” is a stupid term and that only the unjust enemy exists today, he is advancing a thesis about the contemporary morphology of conflict. Classical interstate enmity presupposed a kind of reciprocal recognition: the enemy was a public adversary, a partner in the grim symmetry of war. In the lecture’s world, such symmetry appears as a myth. The predominant objects of violence are treated as illegitimate: terrorists, dispersed groups, pirates, criminals, monsters. The war relation becomes asymmetric in its justificatory structure because one side is cast as the guardian of order and the other as an outlaw. Bojanić’s earlier remark that hostis iniustus has a “huge capacity for peace” then becomes intelligible: the concept enables the formation of a peace-seeking unity by identifying what must be excluded. Yet this same mechanism also undermines symmetric restraint, because the excluded party is described in terms that weaken the idea of reciprocal limits. Bojanić’s short phrase, “impossibility and myth of a symmetric use of force,” finds its transcript-ground here: symmetry is rhetorically invoked, yet the institution that authorizes violence is built to generate asymmetry.

This is precisely why his displacement of the peace text as “intermezzo” is philosophically consequential. Bojanić insists that Kant’s peace fragment is conceptually thin when separated from Kant’s war lectures and justifications of preemption. Peace, in Kant’s treatment as presented here, appears as an institutional arrangement within a field where war is structurally present. Bojanić’s emphasis on prevention and preemption ties Kant to a doctrine of anticipatory violence: one may act against preparation, against potentiality. This doctrine thickens the concept of threat, and it tends to dissolve the temporal restraint that classical defensive war required. Yet Bojanić does not present this as a simple moral failure; he presents it as a recognizable form of reasoning, one we enact in ordinary life. The everyday analogy serves as a warrant: practical rationality often treats preparations as grounds for action. The difficulty is that, once scaled to war, such reasoning expands the domain of legitimate targets and encourages the production of enemies whose threat is inferential rather than manifest.

The lecture’s philological emphasis on the institutionalization of peace then supplies a counterweight: peace cannot be guaranteed by mere promises; it must be produced by structures. Yet Bojanić’s medical-therapeutic detour reveals that such production is conceived through the logic of controlled harm. Vaccination is the key metaphor: a dose of violence administered to prevent a greater violence. This metaphor is not incidental. It is a conceptual bridge between preventive war and institutional peace. It suggests that preventive war can be construed as the violent component of peace-making, an inoculation administered to a political body. In this register, the unjust enemy becomes the pathogen: a figure whose destruction appears as public health. The lecture thus exposes a deep affinity between security discourse and immunological reasoning, an affinity that makes “destroy” appear as a hygienic necessity rather than as a tragic last resort.

The League of Nations passage intensifies this immunological structure by making the “outside” explicit. The League exists to protect against attacks “from without,” and Bojanić turns that single word into a conceptual lever. If the League is formed by an original social contract among states, then the very idea of “without” suggests that the contract presupposes an exteriority. The exteriority can be empirical—non-member states—or it can be produced as a conceptual remainder: something that cannot be integrated, something that stands as the condition for the League’s unity. Bojanić’s remark that we are “producing all the time without” implies that the outside is not merely given; it is generated by the unity’s own self-maintenance. The unjust enemy is the name under which this produced outside becomes visible and actionable.

Here the lecture also introduces a crucial shift in scale. Bojanić moves from the international to the domestic by describing a “civil society” work of policing: “we are policemen,” he says, trying to recognize who produces bad or evil acts, and we have to destroy that agent. This is a strong claim because it treats the unjust enemy concept as continuous with everyday governance. The concept is no longer merely an instrument of international law; it is an operator of internal security. The war-like act of destruction becomes a policing-like act of neutralization. In this way the lecture suggests that the modern world’s central antagonism is organized less as state-versus-state and more as order-versus-disorder, legality-versus-criminality, society-versus-terror. The unjust enemy is the figure that makes this antagonism legible. It is the point at which moral disgust, legal classification, and technical capacity to kill converge.

The pirate figure then becomes the lecture’s most concentrated expression of this convergence. Pirates are dispersed, non-state, secretive. They are cast as enemies of all, and thus they possess an extraordinary unifying power: they put states together. In this sense the pirate is the prototype for later “terrorist” figures in the lecture’s narrative. The unifying force does not arise from the pirate’s strength. It arises from the pirate’s legal-moral status as someone who cannot be treated as a normal adversary. The lecture’s invocation of hostis humani generis condenses the point: the unjust enemy can be constructed as outside humanity’s common legal order, which yields a permission structure for collective violence. The “monster,” the “mad dog,” the being “not human,” are variations of the same structure. Each variation shifts the adversary away from reciprocal recognition and toward exterminable impurity.

The Q&A then forces the lecture to face the practical implications of this structure. The question about destroying an idea exposes a decisive fracture. If the unjust enemy is linked to evil, then the object of destruction tends to become ideological, and ideological objects bleed into populations. This is the route toward limitless annihilation. Bojanić’s response, with its emphasis on codices, victory criteria, and military prudence, attempts to re-anchor destruction in administrable targets. He suggests that it is possible to specify what can be destroyed and what counts as victory. Yet this re-anchoring comes at a cost. It shifts restraint away from conceptual clarity and toward institutional practice. It implies that the boundary against annihilation is maintained by professional norms and rules of engagement rather than by the concept of unjust enemy itself. The concept, on this reading, remains a powerful authorization device, while the limitation of its consequences depends on the prudence of institutions that execute violence.

The lecture’s remarks on drones and technological progress deepen this ambivalence. As targeting becomes easier, the temptation to treat destruction as a clean operation grows. The moral friction that once inhibited violence can be reduced when killing is presented as precise, remote, and instrumental. In such a context the unjust enemy concept becomes even more valuable as a moral supplement: it supplies the ethical narrative that makes technical destruction appear as justice. Bojanić’s insistence that the ethics of war is the history of permission to kill and the manner of killing indicates a methodological orientation: ethics is not primarily a set of ideals; it is a historical record of constraints and authorizations adjusted to evolving capacities. The unjust enemy concept belongs to that history as a recurring authorization that adapts to new means.

The later question about “mere enemy” and enemy criminal law then presses the lecture into a terminological oscillation that is itself philosophically revealing. Bojanić moves between proposals: replacing hostis iniustus with “just enemy,” replacing it with “enemy,” or defending “unjust enemy” as a beautiful contemporary idea. The oscillation reflects a real conceptual pressure. “Enemy” as such can preserve reciprocal constraints under international law, including protections against torture. Yet “enemy” also feels too symmetrical for a world where the predominant targets are framed as terrorists and clandestine agents. “Unjust enemy” captures contemporary patterns of moralized security, yet it risks collapsing into a mechanism for denying legal protection. Bojanić’s phrase about the enemy choosing me offers a phenomenology of imposed threat, which tends to support the moral urgency of defense. Yet the lecture also repeatedly insists that consensus decides the enemy. The two claims conflict in a productive way. If the enemy chooses me, then hostility is objective and imposed. If consensus decides, then hostility is socially produced and politically mediated. The unjust enemy concept sits at the intersection: it presents socially mediated designation as if it were objective imposition.

This is why the lecture’s reliance on “moment” language matters. When asked “why Serbia,” Bojanić says it was a moment, a chaos, a necessity to intervene. The concept of moment functions here as a temporal condensation that suspends extended causal inquiry. It offers a justification structure in which urgency replaces deliberation, and intervention appears as a response to a crisis that cannot wait for full evaluation. This moment-logic is congruent with preventive war doctrine: one acts before harm manifests, because waiting would be irresponsible. Yet moment-logic also amplifies the danger that the unjust enemy concept will be applied opportunistically. If crises are defined by urgency and consensus, then the concept can be mobilized to create unity in conditions of uncertainty, precisely where mistakes and excesses are most likely.

The lecture’s closing directive—read Gentili, not Schmitt—then acquires a more specific meaning. It is not merely a bibliographic recommendation. It is an instruction about method: to understand the unjust enemy concept one must examine its juristic differentiations, its taxonomies of hostility, and the conditions under which an adversary remains a public enemy rather than collapsing into a monster. Gentili, in Bojanić’s portrayal, offers “pages and pages” of distinctions. Such distinctions are not scholastic ornament. They function as potential brakes on the slide from war to extermination. If one understands the spectrum of enemy types, one may resist the temptation to compress them into a single demonized figure. The lecture thus ends by proposing that better reading is itself a political-ethical act: conceptual discrimination can support institutional restraint.

Yet the lecture also leaves a deeper unresolved tension that merits explicit articulation. Bojanić repeatedly suggests that peace requires institution and that institution requires measured violence. The unjust enemy concept appears as one of the instruments through which measured violence can be directed: it identifies what must be excluded so that unity can be formed. At the same time, he demonstrates that the concept’s history is saturated with metaphors of monstrosity and dehumanization, which weaken the very conditions for measure. The concept promises to regulate violence by moralizing it, yet moralization easily expands violence by dissolving the sense of a shared legal world. The lecture’s own oscillations—between discarding the enemy term, rehabilitating it, defending the unjust enemy as positive, and warning against Schmittian celebration—are therefore philosophically appropriate. They enact the instability of an institution that must simultaneously serve peace and authorize destruction.

If one follows the lecture’s internal warrants, the most plausible reconstruction is that Bojanić is attempting to isolate an operational core of the unjust enemy institution: its capacity to produce unity by positing an outside, and its capacity to translate that unity into permission for force. This core is stable across examples: Hamas, Serbia, pirates, and the abstract “terrorist” figure. The differences among these cases concern the degree of publicity, the status of statehood, the visibility of targets, and the proximity to ideological objects. These differences matter because they determine how easily destruction can be bounded. A state can be bombed in the name of stopping governmental violence, yet the state remains a public entity with institutions and territory. A dispersed group blurs into populations and ideas. Pirates and terrorists are invoked as secretive and non-associative, which encourages a logic of generalized suspicion. The lecture implies, without fully spelling out, that the more the target is described as dispersed and ideological, the more the concept of unjust enemy tends toward limitless application.

The lecture also indirectly sketches a criterion for when the unjust enemy concept functions as a peace instrument rather than as a pretext for annihilation: the existence of robust institutional constraints that maintain the adversary’s status within law, even while authorizing force. Bojanić’s confidence in military prudence points in this direction, though it remains contested by the questioner’s concern about ideological destruction. His insistence that policing and military sectors are “arranged” against stupidity indicates an institutionalist faith: rules can contain violence. The philosophical difficulty is that the unjust enemy concept’s moral intensity can pressure institutions to expand their permissions. When the adversary is described as evil, secrecy-laden, monstrous, and outside humanity, the administrative ethos of restraint can be politically overridden. Bojanić gestures to this when he contrasts politicians’ madness with military prudence. The implication is that the decisive battle is often intra-institutional: between professional constraint and political mobilization.

Finally, the lecture’s relationship to Kant becomes clearer in this framework. Kant is presented as a realist who accepts war’s persistence and who seeks to institutionalize peace under conditions of state-nature. In this Kantian setting, the unjust enemy concept functions as a limiter and as a unifier: it distinguishes those who can be part of an order of restraint from those who threaten the very possibility of peace. Yet this limiting function is precarious because it depends on who is authorized to declare injustice and under what conditions. The lecture repeatedly returns to consensus as the practical answer. Consensus supplies legitimacy, yet it also supplies danger, because consensus can be produced through fear and moral panic. The lecture therefore suggests that Kant is both resource and risk: a resource insofar as institutional peace requires juridical imagination, a risk insofar as preventive war and exclusionary unity can be derived from the same imagination.

The lecture’s most technically instructive moment, even in its compressed improvised form, occurs when Bojanić moves from the large moral drama of “all against one” to the micro-problem of a single lexical item, “without,” in the League of Nations passage. This shift is methodologically revealing because it shows how his reconstruction proceeds: he treats a philosophical text as an arrangement of operational triggers, where a seemingly modest adverb can expose the institutional logic that a grand concept otherwise conceals. The adverb “without,” in the quoted formulation that a league is necessary “to protect against attacks from without,” becomes for him a point where the text betrays the condition of its own possibility. The league imagines itself as a unity constituted on contract-like grounds, and yet unity, insofar as it is oriented toward protection, requires the positing of an exterior that threatens. The “without” thus functions as an index of a structural remainder: even a collective that aspires to comprehensive inclusion produces a conceptual outside, and that outside furnishes the stage on which the unjust enemy can appear as an actionable object.

This is why Bojanić’s insistence that the unjust enemy is needed “to arrange” peace deserves to be read as a thesis about institutional grammar rather than as an empirical claim about particular wars. “To arrange” is a deliberately modest verb, and its modesty is philosophically charged. It refrains from metaphysical elevation and presents the concept’s role as administrative: the unjust enemy is a device that permits organization, coordination, and stabilization of an order. The lecture thereby relocates the concept from the plane of moral truth to the plane of institutional work. In this sense, the unjust enemy is neither primarily discovered nor deduced; it is produced as a functional necessity for an order that wants to represent itself as peace-oriented while retaining the capacity for violence. The presence of “without” is the textual symptom of this necessity.

Once this is seen, Bojanić’s otherwise abrupt transition to “civil society” policing gains coherence. When he says “we are policemen” searching for who produces bad or evil acts and must be destroyed, he is not merely lamenting contemporary securitization. He is specifying the internal homology between the international league and domestic governance: both operate through a continuous production of an outside that must be neutralized to preserve order. The unjust enemy is the conceptual hinge that allows this homology to function across scales. Its content shifts—pirates, terrorists, rogue states, dispersed groups—yet its institutional role remains stable: it creates a shared field of recognition for those who regard themselves as guardians of right, and it offers a justificatory path from recognition to destruction.

The lecture’s genealogical moves then appear as an attempt to show that this hinge has long been available in Western public law and was never confined to one modern theorist’s conceptual ingenuity. The repeated claims that key authors compile, borrow, and recombine earlier jurists are less about intellectual honesty than about the durability of a certain juridico-political template. Bojanić implicitly treats this template as a kind of portable technology. It can be activated whenever an order requires unity under threat, and it can be activated precisely because the term “enemy,” as he stresses, is weak in substantive determinacy. “Enemy” names a relation, yet it does not by itself fix the normative status of the adversary, the permissible means of war, or the postwar horizon of peace. The unjust enemy concept fills this gap by introducing a moral asymmetry that can be translated into differential permissions. In the lecture’s vocabulary, it gives “capacity for peace,” because it supports the formation of a league and the institutionalization of restraint among those who recognize each other as eligible partners. Yet the same moral asymmetry destabilizes the prospect of symmetrical restraint against the designated outside.

The lecture’s repeated returns to pirates clarify this more sharply than the initial Hamas example, because pirates, in the juristic tradition he gestures toward, are paradigmatic for their ambiguous location between war and crime. Pirates are neither a state nor an ordinary criminal in a single jurisdiction; they are a figure whose legal status encourages universal jurisdiction and collective action. Bojanić stresses their dispersive character and their power to unify the “ancient world,” precisely because they compel states to coordinate. The conceptual lesson is that the unjust enemy figure is not an accidental excrescence of moral panic; it can be built into the architecture of international order, serving as an engine for collective security. Yet this engine works by constructing an adversary as outside the normal reciprocity of war. The pirate thus becomes an early model for later figures who, in modern discourse, are declared “terrorists” and treated as simultaneously political and criminal, simultaneously external and internal, simultaneously warfare targets and policing targets.

This ambiguity reappears when Bojanić emphasizes secrecy. The unjust enemy, he says, does something “secretly,” and this becomes part of what distinguishes it from a public enemy in the classical sense. Secrecy matters because it changes the evidentiary conditions under which violence is authorized. A public enemy confronts; a secretive enemy infiltrates. The latter invites anticipatory measures, surveillance, preemption, and broadened suspicion. The lecture’s insistence that Kant’s most important war-related theme is prevention and preemptive attack then appears less as an incidental historical note and more as a conceptual bridge: secrecy and dispersion strengthen the plausibility of acting on preparations rather than on manifested attacks. The moralized figure of the unjust enemy and the strategic doctrine of preemption reinforce each other, yielding a justificatory structure in which the threshold for violence can be crossed earlier and with less public evidence.

This reinforces the pressure that the questioner later expresses about ideology. Secrecy, dispersion, and ideological commitment tend to converge in contemporary enemy construction: when the adversary is described as a clandestine network driven by an evil idea, the distinction between dismantling capacities and destroying an idea becomes unstable. Bojanić’s response, grounded in codices of war ethics and metrics of victory, attempts to restore operational clarity by insisting that militaries can specify targets and thresholds. Yet the lecture’s own genealogy suggests that operational clarity does not dissolve ideological drift; rather, it can coexist with it. A codified target list can be administered under a narrative that frames the adversary as a monster, and the codification can then appear as a rational instrument of a moral necessity. The lecture thus gives the materials for a sobering inference: institutional rationality does not guarantee moral restraint when the institutional rationality is recruited by a concept whose function is to produce an outside beyond reciprocal recognition.

Bojanić’s medical analogy strengthens this inference. Vaccination and homeopathic strategy are invoked to illuminate Kant’s logic of measured harm. The analogy offers an image of rational dosage and disciplined administration. It suggests that violence can be used to prevent greater violence and can be integrated into a project of health. Yet immunological metaphors also generate their own dangers. They encourage the depiction of adversaries as pathogens and the political body as an organism whose purity must be protected. In such a register, the boundary between prophylaxis and extermination is not drawn by the metaphor itself; it is drawn by the institutional and political conditions that govern how the metaphor is operationalized. Bojanić’s explicit insistence that “you need the violence to do something” and that Kant “belongs to this huge tradition” positions peace-making as inherently tied to violence. This makes his earlier claim about the “capacity for peace” of the unjust enemy institution deeply ambivalent. Peace can be pursued through violence conceived as therapy, yet the same therapeutic framing can intensify exclusionary logic by depicting the target as a contaminant.

The lecture’s internal oscillation over terminology can be read as a symptom of this ambivalence. At one moment Bojanić declares the term “enemy” stupid and insists that only the unjust enemy exists today. Later, under pressure from questions about legal status, he suggests that one can forget hostis iniustus and simply put “enemy,” or conversely forget “enemy” and protect the unjust enemy as a “beautiful idea.” The oscillation is best read as a practical-philosophical difficulty rather than as indecision. The term “enemy,” in its classical juridical sense, supports the reciprocity of war and thereby preserves the possibility of peace through mutual recognition and limitation. The term “unjust enemy” supports the project of peace by producing unity among those who recognize rules, yet it also risks undermining reciprocity by criminalizing or dehumanizing the adversary. Bojanić’s shifting proposals reflect the fact that the two desiderata—reciprocal limitation and coalition-forming moral clarity—do not harmonize easily in contemporary conflict settings dominated by dispersed, clandestine, and ideologically framed targets.

The lecture’s insistence on “consensus” as the decisive condition further intensifies the problem. Consensus appears as the practical answer to the threat of arbitrary designation: if “we are together decided who is the enemy,” then the naming seems stabilized. Yet the lecture also supplies reasons for skepticism about consensus. The “all against one” structure that produces consensus can be generated under conditions of fear, outrage, and strategic interest. Consensus can therefore function as a mechanism of amplification rather than as a safeguard. The concept of unjust enemy, given its genealogy in monstrosity and universal hostility, provides powerful rhetorical resources for mobilizing consensus. In this sense, consensus is not simply a neutral procedural condition; it is itself an effect that the unjust enemy concept helps to produce. The lecture thereby points toward a circularity: the unjust enemy is justified by consensus, and consensus is generated by unjust enemy rhetoric. The circularity is practically effective, which is precisely why it is philosophically and politically dangerous.

Bojanić’s remarks on drones and the future of war supply a further layer. Drones appear as pure instruments of destruction, and destruction is described as increasingly effective. This technological trajectory interacts with the justificatory template in a distinctive way. As capacity for precision increases, violence can be presented as cleaner and more controllable, which lowers the rhetorical cost of authorization. At the same time, the moral intensity of the unjust enemy concept can raise the perceived necessity of using that capacity. The combination yields a regime in which violence can be both technically optimized and morally sanctified. Bojanić’s definition of war ethics as the history of when one has permission to kill and how one can kill becomes, in this setting, a diagnosis of a moving frontier: permissions expand or contract in tandem with capacities, and the unjust enemy concept is one of the principal levers through which expansions are rendered legitimate.

The lecture’s late return to reading practices—Gentili rather than Schmitt—then acquires a final significance. Bojanić is advising a method of conceptual differentiation as an antidote to the flattening moralization of contemporary discourse. If Gentili offers a rich typology of enemies and extensive analysis of their characteristics, then such richness can resist the compression of conflict into a single figure of evil. The lecture’s genealogy implies that moralized compression is precisely what enables the “myth of symmetry” to persist: violence is declared symmetrical in its formal claims, while its justificatory structure is asymmetrical because the adversary is denied reciprocal standing. A differentiated typology can, in principle, preserve the gradations of legal status that keep war from collapsing into extermination.

At the same time, Bojanić’s own lecture exemplifies the difficulty of maintaining such differentiation under contemporary pressure. His choice to begin with Hamas, his casual acknowledgment that there is consensus about destruction, and his rapid movement across terrorists, war criminals, and pirates show how easily the concept tends to absorb diverse cases into a single operational class. The Q&A pushes him toward more nuanced operational distinctions, particularly between dismantling capacities and destroying ideas, and between military prudence and political fanaticism. Yet the lecture ends without a stable conceptual resolution, and that lack of resolution is itself instructive. The unjust enemy concept is being reconstructed as an institution that thrives on precisely this instability: it remains usable because it can slide between war and policing, between public enemy and criminal, between tactical target and ideological contamination.

If the lecture is read as a philosophically serious reconstruction rather than as a settled doctrine, its central achievement is to make visible a structural dependency of modern peace-talk upon the production of an outside. Peace is not presented as a simple condition opposed to war. Peace is presented as an arrangement that must be instituted within a world where war remains structurally available, and the institution of peace therefore depends on devices that manage violence. The unjust enemy is one of the most powerful of these devices, because it can simultaneously authorize violence and create unity among those who claim to be restraining violence. Bojanić’s lecture shows that this double role is conceptually productive and ethically perilous. It is productive because it allows international order to coordinate against actors that disrupt the possibility of reciprocal rules. It is perilous because it encourages a moralized asymmetry that can dissolve restraints, especially when secrecy, dispersion, ideology, and technological capacity converge.

To clarify the lecture’s implied normative orientation, one should attend to its repeated, seemingly casual imperatives: forget Schmitt, forget celebratory enemy talk, read the juristic tradition in its depth, and treat “enemy” language with suspicion. Bojanić is not offering a pacifist stance, and he explicitly accepts Kant’s realism about war and the state of nature among states. He is, however, attempting to expose the conceptual mechanics through which the justification of war survives modern prohibitions on aggression: by shifting justificatory emphasis from declared interstate enmity to the identification of an unjust enemy who can be framed as criminal, monstrous, or universally hostile. His reconstruction suggests that the decisive philosophical task lies in tracking how this identification is produced, what it does institutionally, and how it interacts with doctrines of preemption and with technologies of destruction. The lecture closes, in effect, by placing responsibility on reading, classification, and conceptual discipline, because these are among the few available means for resisting the slide from the institutionalization of peace into the sanctification of limitless violence.