Countering Authoritarian-Leveraged Lawfare in Hybrid (Irregular) Warfare

At recent economic and security meetings in Europe that I attended, there has been alarming reporting on how authoritarian states and their proxies are abusing the international rules-based trading system and infiltration of the American and EU litigation system to obtain highly confidential documents containing proprietary information regarding sensitive technologies across defense, intelligence, hi-tech, and other highly sensitive industries— while also gaining important intellectual property (IP) and trade secrets about their operations and innovations.

Through malicious cyber attacks and asymmetrical maneuvers, these hostile authoritarian regimes are stealing personal identifiable information (PII) and penetrating our critical infrastructure.

Enhanced malign influence operations, subversive, coercive active meaures, and criminal activities are intended to adversely affect a democracy’s popular or political attitudes, perceptions, or behaviors to advance their multi-polar interests through truth pollution, curated messages and false narratives designed to penetrate the West’s information spaces, sow discord, divide communities, and further weaken a community of democracies, untethered to the norms of democratic governance and rule of law.

Moreover, such hostile authoritarian threat networks (and their proxies) are leveraging lawfare to monitor, harass, attack (reputational damage or delegitimize), and silent political enemies and citizens, law enforcement, journalists, human rights workers and anyone else they perceive as a threat to their foreign malign influence and political interference operations.

Crime-terror enablers and proxies are also increasingly exploiting diasporic communities through coercive pressures, and act as extralegal enforcers for their authoritarian and criminal clients and benefactors.?

They are mobilizing diasporic communities to conduct activities in furtherance of criminality corruption , in support of such hostile actions.

Through the long-standing ties and use of diasporic communities and transnational criminal groups including the triads, terrorist financiers, and oligarchic entrepreneurs and mafias, reinforced by such targeted subversive operations, an array of sinister illicit activities and active measures have had a disrupting and destabilizing impact on the political, governance, security, and business structures, and in some cases, have inhibited counter intelligence and law enforcement efforts through strategic corruption in North America, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world.

Lawfare : the strategy of using or misusing law as a weapon in hybrid (irregular) warfare and means to achieve an operational objective.

International Coalition Against Illicit Economies (ICAIE) / ICAIE Labs