Lawfare and the great convergence of authoritarian and democratic regimes around the world

Faculty Colloquium

Guest speaker: Eugénie Mérieau

The concept of lawfare — a portmanteau of "law" and "warfare" — has recently gained traction in legal and political scholarship, referring to a wide range of domestic practices in which law is used to neutralize political opponents. It is a form of abusive militant democracy seeking to pre-emptively remove undesirable candidates and parties from the electoral competition, blurring the line between “rule-of-law” and “rule-by-law”. The weaponization of law and rule-of-law discourses across regime types undermines, in the very end, the entire legalist fetishism, and draws the contours of a global convergence of authoritarian and democratic regimes toward a grey area of hybrid regimes relying on the rule-of-law canon to constrain the political field and police election outcomes. This paper defines lawfare as an abuse of the rule of law, judicial review and militant democracy, and establish a tentative typology of lawfare using recent emblematic cases.

Eugénie Mérieau is Associate Professor of Public Law at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and researcher at the Institute of Juridical and Philosophical Sciences of the Sorbonne (ISJPS/CNRS UMR 8103). Specializing in comparative constitutional law, her research focuses on the globalizations of authoritarian constitutionalism and its legal transplants. She is notably the author of Constitutional Bricolage: Thailand’s Sacred Monarchy vs the Rule of Law (Hart, 2022). She has also published Dictatorship, an Antithesis of Democracy? 20 Misconceptions About Authoritarian Regimes (Cavalier Bleu, 2019; revised edition 2024), Geopolitics of the State of Exception: The Globalizations of Emergency Rule (Cavalier Bleu, 2024), and Constitution (Anamosa, 2025). She is an affiliated researcher at the Centre for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po and at the Centre for Legal Theory, National University of Singapore.