Difficulties in interpreting the phrase 'political offense' in a nation's extradition laws are surveyed. The paper addresses bilateral treaties, one means to circumvent this problem, and concludes that such approaches are unacceptable in practice. Also examined are multilateral extradition treaties, including regional and commonwealth arrangements, and unified texts such as the 1970 Hague Convention formula. The paper proposes a positivism solution which affirms practice of states to insist each on its own qualifications of events and people as a fundamental premise and to structure the approach to extradition to avoid problems of conflicting qualifications. These arguments indicate that states seeking to cooperate in enforcing whatever rules are agreed upon can cooperate even if it is impossible for political reasons to agree on legal classifications, as long as the acts fall below the threshold of what is permissible among soldiers in time of war and also fall below what is permissible to privileged actors like police officers in times of peace. 44 footnotes. (Author summary modified)