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).

Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

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........

© E-International