The war against terrorism allows power to be reorganized at the world level. The procedures of exception set up in its name become the basis of a new legal order that gives judicial powers to administrative authorities. In this globalized process, the United States occupies an exceptional place. It rules an imperial political structure in which the American administration has the privilege of determining the exception and inscribing it into law.

The government of the United States can designate as an enemy any American or any citizen of a state with which the USA is not at war. It can seize or, because of extradition agreements, force any other government to hand over any individual that it designates as a terrorist. It can keep that individual in unlimited detention or, at its discretion, put that individual on trial before exceptional courts of law. Thus the war against terrorism is constitutive. It alters the exercise of internal and external sovereignty. It leads to an organic solidarity among various governments in the surveillance and repression of their populations. The boundary between the maintenance of order and war is blurred. Real wars are presented as police operations and control over citizens is carried out by procedures that belong to counter-espionage.