The description of hadronic matter at small scales
in terms of quarks and glouns confined into hadrons is based
on attaching a physical interpretation to unobservable fields,
and therefore can be ambiguous. We show that using the methods
of the algebraic approach to QFT, in which a theory is defined
only by its algebras of local observables, it is possible to
formulate an intrinsic notion of charge confinement, which can
also be tested in concrete models.
