“Going to court instead of going to war.” Lawfare is the strategic use — or deliberate misuse — of legal processes, international norms, and judicial institutions to achieve political, military, or economic objectives.
Executive Summary
Coined by Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. as “the strategy of using — or misusing — law as a substitute for traditional military means to fulfill an operational objective,” lawfare has become a cornerstone tool of 21st-century great-power competition. States deploy it to legitimize territorial claims, constrain adversaries’ military options, and tie rivals in regulatory and litigation costs. In the 2024–2026 period, it is increasingly wielded as a first-strike capability rather than a defensive shield.
The Strategic Mechanism
Lawfare operates across three interconnected theaters:
- Battlefield Lawfare: Using rules of engagement, humanitarian law, or war crimes allegations to constrain how adversaries fight — forcing compliance costs or reputational damage mid-conflict.
- Institutional Lawfare: Capturing or manipulating international bodies (WTO panels, UNCLOS tribunals, ICC proceedings) to pre-legitimize a state’s strategic moves.
- Domestic Legal Warfare: Enacting national legislation — like China’s National Security Law in Hong Kong or its Data Security Law — that extends jurisdiction extraterritorially, binding foreign firms to domestic political objectives.
China’s “Three Warfares” doctrine — psychological warfare, media warfare, and legal warfare — explicitly institutionalizes lawfare as a PLA operational category. Beijing systematically uses UNCLOS filings, bilateral investment treaties, and UN committee participation to advance claims it cannot enforce militarily without escalation.
Market & Policy Impact
- Corporate exposure: Multinationals operating in contested jurisdictions face dual legal liability — compliance with host-country law may conflict with home-country sanctions or export controls.
- Litigation as deterrence: States and state-backed entities file strategic IP suits, WTO complaints, or investment arbitration claims to slow rivals’ industrial policy execution.
- Regulatory entrapment: Asymmetric environmental or labor standards are invoked to block imports from geopolitical competitors under the guise of technical trade barriers.
- Norm entrepreneurship: Revisionist states push alternative legal frameworks at the UN (e.g., “cyber sovereignty” norms) to erode the Western-anchored international legal order.
- Counter-lawfare emergence: INDOPACOM has begun explicitly incorporating counter-lawfare into strategic planning to challenge China’s South China Sea claims through parallel legal institutions.
Modern Case Study: China’s Nine-Dash Line vs. UNCLOS Tribunal (2024–2026)
The 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling invalidating China’s Nine-Dash Line claims was a landmark counter-lawfare victory for the Philippines — yet Beijing simply refused to recognize the ruling. In 2024–2025, China escalated water-cannon and blockade tactics against Philippine resupply missions near Second Thomas Shoal while simultaneously filing counter-narratives through UN committees and state media, a textbook hybrid of media warfare and legal warfare. Manila responded by publishing meticulous incident logs designed to build an evidentiary record for future international proceedings. The episode illustrates lawfare’s core paradox: it is simultaneously a tool of aggression and a mechanism of accountability, and its effectiveness depends entirely on whether the target state can muster the institutional will to hold the aggressor to the legal standards it publicly professes to accept.