The remorseful enemy

Soliciting a defendant's remorse during sentencing resonates with the idea that the individual has breached the community's shared moral values but can be reincluded through moral transformation. This article examines a criminal justice system in which remorse is sought from defendants convicted of security offenses, belonging to a community deemed to hold values opposed to those of the state that punishes them. A qualitative analysis of sentencing remarks from military courts in the Occupied Palestinian Territories reveals that, while framing defendants as enemies, judges nevertheless solicit remorse, constructing it through discourses of moral reform and an imagined political community with shared values. Against the backdrop of the literature on ‘enemy criminal law’, which suggests that punishing perceived enemies relies on emotional discourses of othering, this article argues that emotions associated with moral reform may also play a legitimizing role in the context of security criminal law and may generate multiple configurations of citizen/enemy subjects.