Lawfare: an elite weapon for democracy destruction
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Data
2020-11-25
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Egress@s
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Descrição
It is not just rights and identities that are saturated with the culture
of legality. Politics itself, its conflicts, and instruments of affirmation,
increasingly tend, everywhere, to migrate to the judiciary. Citizens,
governments, and corporations litigating against each other, at the
different intersections of the law, in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of
coalitions and cleavages.
Democracy was judicialized in Argentina in 2015; in Ecuador,
in 2017; and in Brazil, in 2016 and 2018, when the force of
the law was deployed to remove its leaders and to decide
the national elections; in Bolivia, in 2019, the force of arms
imposed a return to the colonial political-judicial system.
By these means, political processes are held hostage to the dialectic
of law and disorder.
Colonialism and imperialism, too, are subjected to the scales
of justice to seek reparation for the damage caused to the victims
of history, thus to call to account the violence of the colonized
against the colonizer, violence made legal by resort to imperial
jurisprudence. On the other hand, kleptocracy makes the use of
legal instruments, and the coercion inherent in the law, to commit
acts of political erasure, and even annihilation of the weak, the
racial despised, the colonized.
This comes to a head, nowadays, in the phenomenon of
lawfare, addressed in this book: the action, in a post-colony,
or agents of the state who use legalities to violate the person,
property, dignity, and right of some or all of its citizens.
Brazil is an infamous case of a Latin American country that, through
the strategic use of the law, has backed a reactionary, oppressive
regime, in which the exercise of power reduces many people’s lives
to a necropolitics stripped of legitimacy and ethics.
In this context, new types of physical and legal subjects are
created, allowing oligarchs to take advantage of the tendrils of the
state to promote their monopolistic economic ends. While I could
not participate in the panel last year on which this book is based, I
convey to Brazilians, and to all peoples affected by the violence of the
law, the hope and belief that, sooner or later, the oppressive, illegal
use of legalities will be removed from their lives [...] (Professor John Comaroff - Harvard University, in Preface I, p. 19)
Palavras-chave
Lawfare, Democracy, Human rights, Fundamental rights
Citação
MARTINS JÚNIOR, Osmar Pires (org.). Lawfare: an elite weapon for democracy destruction. Goiânia: Egress@s, 2020. E-book. ISBN 978-85-400-3200-2. Disponível em: https://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/handle/ri/19274?mode=full