ABSTRACT
Today, the authors contend, a new figure of the enemy is emerging, namely a global enemy, or the enemy 'live', that is, the newly visible ongoing series of ephemeral monsters who in 'real-time' haunt the collective, mass-mediated imaginary of globalized disorder. It is absolutely essential for every political association to appeal to the naked violence of coercive means in the face of outsiders as well as in the face of internal enemies. This new figure of the enemy is omnipresent today, but the authors first encountered the enemy live on the scenes of military-humanitarian intervention that they have visited in their ethnographic fieldwork since the mid 1990s in the post communist western Balkans in particular. The three figures of the enemy that Michel Foucault's genealogy suggests have today been supplanted by a fourth figure. God's enemy, the king's enemy, and the people's enemy have given way to the global enemy.
