Whistleblower protection laws are growing in strength and number across the globe. Whistleblowing workers enjoy stronger legal rights than ever before. But there are dangers. Laws can be undermined by powerful employers with deep pockets intent on exploiting loopholes to suppress public whistleblowing. Lawfare is one such tactic. Whistleblowers can find themselves exposed, and in extreme cases, prosecuted for speaking up. The high-profile story of Theranos’s Erika Cheung illustrates this chapter. As a twenty-three-year-old graduate, Erika blew the whistle on the most famous white-collar crime of recent years. After whistleblowing, she was aggressively pursued by her former employer’s legal counsel: a nationally renowned firm. Along with other whistleblowers, Erika’s testimony would prove pivotal in convicting senior executives. This chapter introduces the new world of whistleblower reprisal, including lawfare tactics ranging from NDAs to SLAPPs and over-reaching trade secrets laws. It points to the vulnerability faced by individual whistleblowers whose rights to protection ‘on paper’ offer scant help in practice. It shows how good lawyers are important, but in the end, they are often not enough.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of Rwandas daring experiment in transitional justice – and of the many misconceptions surrounding it. This introductory chapter describes the countrys pursuit of accountability in the wake of the 1994 genocide as a justice facade and the final institutional design of the countrys so-called gacaca courts as an instantiation of “extremist institutionalism,” one that turned legalism into lawfare.

Chapter 2 introduces and configures the concept of lawfare. This framework chapter sets the theoretical scene for what is to come. Whereas both legalism and lawfare, in the books conception, serve the standard functions of regulation in a given polity, the author demonstrates that only lawfare is intended qua system to also serve a function otherwise considered the hallmark of warfare. The chapter elaborates defining attributes of – and pathways to – lawfare. It also situates the books theoretical argument about lawfare in existing work on the rule of violence.

Chapter 12 concludes the book and ties its different strands together. It explains why, and when, lawfare came to be seen by leading RPF cadres as a functional equivalent to warfare. The chapter further explains why Rwanda’s present resembles its past to a remarkable degree. More specifically, the analysis demonstrates that the government of threat and care in the twenty-first century was informed by a raison d’état that has driven the imposition of grand institutional designs ever since the precolony. What this concluding chapter offers is a path-dependent argument about the rise of lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda. As such, it illustrate the analytic payoff of taking the study of the country’s gacaca courts out of the context of transitional justice.

Chapter 1 sets the historical and theoretical background of the book. It starts by describing the regulatory battles that took place from the 1970s to adopt more stringent tobacco control measures. Then, it illustrates how the negotiations of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and the subsequent WTO and international investment disputes can be considered the internationalisation of the tobacco wars. In this context, the concept of ‘lawfare’ is introduced as a descriptive device and analytical tool for the analysis of the book. The second part of the introduction introduces the second fil rouge of the book: evidence. It begins by defining the notion of evidence and by showing how, in the context of tobacco control, it can refer to different bodies of evidence that pertain both to the risk assessment and risk management dimension of tobacco control measures. This second part, moreover, shows how evidence has always been one of the key points of contention in the tobacco wars and has continued to be so in the international tobacco control lawfare. The introduction concludes with an explanation of the methodology employed, a reflection on its limits, and an outline of the content of the book.

In addition to summarising the main findings of the book, this final chapter offers some reflections on the lessons that emerge from the history of the international tobacco control lawfare. The reflections are organised around the two main themes of the book: lawfare (Section 5.1) and evidence (Section 5.2). The first part offers some thoughts on the value of using ‘lawfare’ as an analytical tool, zooming in on the role of business actors in international regulation (Section 5.1.1) and on a reflexive account on one’s research (Section 5.1.2). The second part summarises the main topics related to evidence that have emerged in the book: the different types of evidence in risk assessment and risk management (Section 5.2.1), international law’s overreliance on evidence (Section 5.2.2), evidence as a weapon (Section 5.2.3), and evidence as an ideological battleground (Section 5.2.4).

Political technology' is not a term much used in the West. But spin and political consulting are outdated labels. Spin doctors and political consultants do more than spin or consult; they also meet the definition of engineers of the political system. Particularly in the United States, where a different type of political universe has been constructed: Political Action Committees, dark money and astroturfing.

In this and the following chapters I analyse the history of abyssal exclusions brought about by modern state law. I define lawfare as any performance in the name of law (a declaration, norm, sentence, official action or omission) premised on the extreme strangeness of the addressee or target, either because the latter is not fully human (the stranger as a subhuman being) or because its actions must be sanctioned without the normative constraints of the rule of law (the stranger as an internal or external enemy). The long journey of lawfare is the long journey of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. It has undergone multiple metamorphoses and reincarnations since the sixteenth century. From colonial law to imperial law, from the penal law of the enemy to the criminalisation of protest, and from the war on corruption to the war on migration, the abyssal exclusion of targeted social groups has been carried out by lawfare. In every instance, modern domination has found ways of separating humanity from subhumanity, friend from enemy, and non-abyssal social exclusion from abyssal exclusion. There is no reason to believe that new metamorphoses will not appear. The abyssal line is the most resilient and most fundamental structure of Western domination. Only successful struggles against capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy will bring about the progressive dislocation of the abyssal line through sustained interruptions of the institutions upon which Western domination reproduces itself, namely the state and the law.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of peripheral state-building: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. Legal pluralism is an issue of fragmented social control. State–society struggles for social control are complicated because both the state and society are internally divided. The concept of nested sovereignty captures how the state is divided in imperial and federal settings. The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. Building on this foundation, the chapter then theorizes state-building lawfare from above. In particular, it outlines when and why central and peripheral authorities promote non-state legal systems, as well as how conflict changes the political rationale of promoting legal pluralism. After that, the chapter interrogates state-building lawfare from below – focusing on individual choices between state and non-state legal systems. It also speculates about how conflict transforms the driving forces behind these choices – in identities and social norms – as well as resources, interests, and hierarchies, with a special focus on gender relations.

The introduction opens the book with two puzzles. The first is that the government of the Chechen Republic, which is formally in charge of implementing Russian state law, openly promotes customary law and Sharia. The second is that despite a history of state violence and strong social norms against going to court, state law is nevertheless actively used by some segments of the Chechen population. The chapter argues that state-building in places like Chechnya can be understood as lawfare – the use of state and non-state legal systems to achieve political goals. The chapter discusses how this approach enriches scholarly understanding of state-building. It also outlines the book’s methods of inquiry. It previews the historical analysis that traces transformations of legal pluralism in Chechnya under different incarnations of nested sovereignty: the Russian Empire, the Soviet state, de facto independence, and post-Soviet federation. Then it explains the rationale of comparative analysis that contrasts state-building lawfare in Chechnya with the neighboring Muslim-majority regions of Russia. Finally, it introduces evidence – fieldwork observations, ethnographic interviews, original survey data, official judicial reports, and the corpus of court hearings.

Liberal democracy is under siege. Conservative and reactionary political forces are undermining democratic processes to such an extent that we may be witnessing the emergence of hybrid political systems composed of democratic and dictatorial components. Brazil since 2018 is presented as an example of this dangerous degradation of liberal democracy. The chapter identifies the four main components of this process: electing autocrats, the plutocratic virus, fake news and algorithms, and the hijacking of institutions.