Epilogue

Summary

The epilogue retraces the explanations, inchoate in the book, for the exacerbation of state power resting on enhanced technological capacities and de-/reconstructed legal frameworks. It suggests that the studied socio-techno-legal phenomena of extensive warfare and state power have developed because of the infinite enmity that characterizes the relationship between states and transnational jihadist groups and networks. This radical and unequal enmity reveals the dependence of norms, although they necessarily present gray areas and uncertainties, on concrete situations. When this concrete situation is replaced by other parameters, legal grey zones that never appeared to be problematic under the first scenario emerge as factors of infinite warfare. The epilogue formulates concluding thoughts on how the described phenomenon might evolve when technological capacities of drones are even further enhanced and they become autonomous, and how state power might accordingly evolve in the quest to annihilate members of jihadist groups, or infinite enemies.