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1996
In 1996, People’s Republic of China (PRC) President Jiang Zemin advised a group of Chinese international law experts that China “must be adept at using international law as a weapon.”
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1999
In 1999, a book titled Unrestricted Warfare, which was written by two PRC colonels and published by the PRC military, repeatedly referenced the concept of using law as a weapon, sometimes referring to it as “legal warfare.” The book provided a list of “examples of non-military warfare,” which included “establishing international laws that primarily benefit a certain country.” The list also included “the use of domestic trade law on the international stage,” which the book asserted “can have a destructive effect that is equal to that of a military operation.”
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2001
In 2001, Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., at the time a senior JAG officer in the United States Air Force, coined the term “lawfare,” defining it to mean “the use of law as a weapon of war,” in a scholarly article.
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2003
In 2003, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and the Chinese Central Military Commission approved the prominent place of lawfare in their warfare doctrine of non-kinetic tools by including “legal warfare,” characterized as “the use of international and domestic laws to gain international support and manage possible political repercussions of China’s military actions.”
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2016
In 2016, Arizona State University law professor Orde Kittrie, in his book Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War, described lawfare as predominantly including two interrelated forms: 1) “instrumental lawfare” – the instrumental use of legal tools to achieve the same or similar effects as those traditionally sought from kinetic military action; and 2) “compliance-leverage disparity lawfare” – lawfare, typically on the kinetic battlefield, which is designed to gain advantage from the greater influence that law and its processes exerts over an adversary
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2021
In 2021, National Defense University Professor Jill Goldenziel, in her article titled “Law as a Battlefield: The U.S., China, and the Global Escalation of Lawfare,” defined lawfare as “1) the purposeful use of law taken toward a particular adversary with the goal of achieving a particular strategic, operational, or tactical objective, or 2) the purposeful use of law to bolster the legitimacy of one’s own strategic, operational, or tactical objectives toward a particular adversary, or to weaken the legitimacy of a particular adversary’s particular strategic, operational, or tactical objectives.”
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2022
In 2022, NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), guided by its Legal Advisor, Andres Munoz Mosquera, issued a directive which uses the term “legal operations” to refer to lawfare, and created a “Legal Operations Team” to monitor and counter adversaries’ conduct of “legal operations”/lawfare. The directive, and various documents emanating from the NATO/SHAPE Office of Legal Affairs, defined “legal operations” as “the use of law as an instrument of power,” explaining the term may encompass any category of actions in the international “legal environment by state or non-state actors aimed at, among others, gaining/undermining legitimacy, advancing/undermining interests, or enhancing/denying capabilities, whether at the tactical, operational and/or strategic/political levels.”
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2022
Also in 2022, the United States Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) launched a Counter-Lawfare Center, principally to address PRC legal warfare. The INDOPACOM Counter-Lawfare Center defines lawfare as “the use – or misuse – of law as a means to achieve a strategic, operational, or tactical objective,” noting that it “[m]ay also be used to create false legitimacy for unlawful national/military objectives or coercive actions.”
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2023-25
Most recently, several scholars, including Justin Canfil, Peter Dombrowski, Douglas Guilfoyle, and Simon Reich have used the term “legal statecraft” to refer to, for example, “the strategic use of law, legal institutions, and legal norms as a core instrument of state power and legitimacy.” In adopting the NATO/SHAPE framing, we believe that our definition of “international lawfare” includes what these scholars refer to as “legal statecraft.”
