ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘lawfare’ has increasingly been used across the spectrum of military operations to shape the actions available to an opponent and to influence the outcomes of armed conflict. Such actions have been used to gain specific tactical advantages, limit action at the operational level, or as is more usually the case, to exert influence on the strategic stage. This chapter reviews how law and, by implication, lawfare, can play a role in international security and military doctrines. It will do so by analysing lawfare waged to influence military operations; as well as lawfare utilised outside of situations of armed conflict in the ‘grey zone’. The rise of the term lawfare has been a divisive one: the implication that the use of the law, to coincide with particular military outcomes can represent an unwelcome manipulation of legal mechanisms and the rules-based order they are intended to support. However, recent uses have demonstrated the law may also be deployed to reinforce the rules-based international legal order. Regardless of the manner of its use, the coordinated use of the law aligned to military and security outcomes is on the rise.
