Lawfare is the best neologism of 2004

Lawfare is the best neologism of 2004. It just encapsulates everything that is wrong with the modern corporate state: an unholy trinity of the state, corporations and the law.

The curious thing is that the term was originally coined as a criticism of the International Court of Justice's decision regarding the Israeli 'fence'. I do agree that seeking an 'injunction' (for the lack of a better word) against a foreign nation-state is a form of lawfare; but to see it as the ONLY form of lawfare is just blind. It takes a degree of cognitive dissonance to claim that you are defending democracracies while being critical of the use of lawfare by other nation states. I think Kant theorises that liberal nation-states will never be at war with each other. I think he's wrong. Lawfare and its sibling, tradefare (which I just made up!), are the only two kinds of warfare that liberal democracies *can* wage against each other. America certainly uses international law to force countries to make large concessions to them in their trading agreements. I mean, the power of review they have over the 51st State (Australia) after the Free Trade Agreement.

I'd even go further and argue that lawfare is made possible by liberal democracies - because direct forms of warfare are actively discouraged by the construction of liberal democracies... kinda. Kant was very against conscription and believed that liberal democracies should not have large standing armies. America followed this policy right until Vietnam, after which they increased massively their standing army, and certainity the USes 'extension' of the tours of duty of those poor souls in Iraq amounts to conscription... but that's a digression. Lawfare emerges in a system dominated by liberal democracies, because its the only politically safe choice that actors - whether state, corporate or individual - have to achieve their wider goals. Lawfare is the new civil war and its just spilling over into the international realm.

To me, its just fait accompli that the United Nations would encourage the use of lawfare over warefare... thats the WHOLE POINT of the UN. One of the four purposes of the UN was "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" (Para 1 of the Charter) and it tries to encourage 'alternative dispute resolution' (hehehe) in Chapter 7. That this ADR would take the form of 'lawfare' is obvious... what other form would it take? Harsh language? To criticise the UN for encouraging lawfare over traditional warfare is an indirect attack on one of the founding purposes of the UN. Its an attack made by those who believe that the prohibition on war should be lifted. Much of the language espoused by the US and other state-actors like Australia, post Sept-11 has been constructed for that purpose... to put us in a state of perpetual unending war in order to make Article 2 and all of Chapter 7 of the UN Charter irrelevant...

Of course, the modern battlespace HAS changed and its not like lawfare is going to help stop Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations. The whole problem with fourth-wave terrorism is that it its becoming 'open-source - a virtual network of unaffiliated global guerrillas. The neo-con warriors are struggling to grasp this new matrix of conflict. While they see that lawfare certainly WON'T work against transnational networks, they are failing to see that neither will traditional counterterrorist methods.

But, transgressing, that won't stop lawfare becoming the modus operandi for civil wars fought in and between liberal democracies. After all, as the terrorists disaggregate themselves, liberal democracies are becoming increasingly ruled by corporations (in the encyclopedic sense of the term).

Or something like that.