Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was one of the twentieth century’s most controversial political theorists and jurists. While his writings remain entangled with his Nazi associations, recent attention has moved to a broader engagement with his ideas and their explanatory power to account for the modern legal, social and political environment in which we find ourselves. There is an increasing engagement with Schmitt’s work, and here we attempt to quantify that engagement in the context of the current discourse about the ‘War on Terror’.