At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia this April, artificial intelligence consumed much of the air in many of the rooms during the event’s twentieth annual gathering. Yet, across the sessions focused on press safety, a different, less visible threat kept pushing its way into the conversation. One of the speakers, Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and co-founder of Philippine news outlet Rappler, gave it its sharpest name: “death by a thousand cuts.”
She was not speaking metaphorically. She was describing five tax evasion cases, eleven arrest warrants in a little over a year, two arrests in six weeks, a company that could not open a bank account, $1.5 million spent on legal costs in a single year, and the experience of being questioned at Australian customs — on arrival and on departure — for offenses she has always denied. “I work-flowed it,” she said, with the weary precision of someone who has had to treat their own persecution as a project management problem.
What Ressa was describing has a name in legal and advocacy circles: lawfare. And it is moving rapidly from those circles into the mainstream of journalism discourse.
Beyond SLAPPs: what lawfare actually means
Most journalists and press freedom advocates are now familiar with SLAPPs — Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation — the use of expensive litigation to silence critics and exhaust their resources. Awareness has grown to the point that the European Union adopted its Anti-SLAPP Directive in April 2024, and similar efforts are underway across national legislatures.
But lawfare is a considerably broader problem — and a considerably harder one to see.
While a SLAPP is a lawsuit, lawfare is a hidden strategy. It is the deliberate weaponization of legal systems, administrative frameworks, regulatory bodies, and bureaucratic processes to suppress dissent and silence journalism — not through overt censorship, but through the machinery of apparent legality. A criminal libel case is visible; a tax audit is not. A journalist jailed for their reporting makes headlines; a journalist whose media organization is denied a license renewal, or whose passport is quietly confiscated, or who faces a daily obligation to report to a police station, largely goes unnoticed.
“The headline-grabbing tactics — jailing of journalists, assassination, attacks — are recognized,” said human rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC at the festival’s session on what she and her colleagues have taken to calling “lawfare light.” “But with ‘death by a thousand cuts’ — attritional efforts to prevent journalists from doing their jobs — the world looks away. And yet the end result is the same.”
She shared examples ranging from Ethiopia, where journalists have found it mysteriously difficult to get licenses renewed ahead of elections, to Egypt, where travel bans and daily check-ins at police stations have become tools of control.
More challenges include cases in Guatemala and Hong Kong, where clients of hers have been targeted not for their journalism but for alleged money laundering and fraud. “New ways of dressing up a whole lot of administrative, regulatory attacks as if they’re a bureaucratic issue, nothing to do with journalism,” as Gallagher put it. “Authorities have become more creative.”
Four playbooks — and a spreading contagion
What makes lawfare particularly dangerous is that its practitioners are learning from each other across borders and regimes. Gallagher, who sits on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), identified four distinct playbooks at work in the session “Journalism and the law: standing together against rising intimidation“:
The first is the discrediting playbook: target the journalist personally, not their work. If you can make a publisher-editor appear to be a tax evader or a fraudster, you undermine not only the individual but also everything they have reported. It is not coincidental, Gallagher noted, that the most prominent targets — Ressa, Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, José Rubén Zamora in Guatemala — are publisher-editors. “Make people doubt both the messenger and the message.”
The second is the ecosystem strangulation playbook: do not just target the journalist, target their support structure. Their lawyers. Their funding. In five years, as Ressa noted in her Nobel Prize speech, 22 journalists and 63 lawyers were killed in the Philippines. Foreign agent laws and foreign influence laws — spreading from Russia to Georgia and beyond — target the financial lifelines of independent media.
The third is the immigration playbook: deny visas, impose travel bans, deport. These tactics, long associated with China and authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and the Middle East, are now, as Gallagher observed, being discussed in relation to the United States.
The fourth is the legal pick-and-mix playbook: deploy multiple laws simultaneously across multiple jurisdictions, creating an overwhelming legal burden with no single clear press-freedom principle to contest. At the time of her murder in Malta, investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing 48 separate lawsuits. “People targeted with multiple laws at the same time,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher also highlights in this final playbook the use of what she calls “false friends” — such as “fake news” laws — alongside the strategic deployment of multiple legal instruments simultaneously. This cumulative use of legal tools is not incidental. As research on journalism safety shows, particularly in contexts often considered secure, legal harassment rarely occurs in isolation. Instead, it tends to involve overlapping and repeated actions, including “multiple claims or threats” (Rožukalne et al., 2025, p. 12), reinforcing the systemic and strategic nature of these pressures.
The geographic spread of these tactics matters. As Lucia Mesquita, the principal investigator of the Lawfare Against Journalism project, launched at the festival, argued: “Action which came from authoritarian regimes’ playbooks have now spread everywhere, especially in democracies. Something from the majority world is now being used to attack dissenting voices in democracies, including journalists.” This inversion of the usual frame — the Global South as the origin of a tactic now threatening northern democracies — is both intellectually important and politically uncomfortable.
Is this just an authoritarian problem?
The temptation is to think of lawfare as something that happens elsewhere — in the Philippines, in Turkey, in Egypt — and that established democracies with independent judiciaries are essentially immune. The evidence discussed in Perugia suggests otherwise, though it also calls for precision.
Nevsin Mengu, a Turkish journalist who has spent 25 years navigating her country’s media environment and has herself received a suspended prison sentence, currently under appeal, offered a cautionary word. “I don’t think the US is comparable to Turkey,” she said. “There’s an institutionalized system; it’ll pass in a few years. In Turkey, it’s THE system.” The distinction between a democracy experiencing democratic backsliding and an authoritarian state where the rule of law has been fully subordinated to political power is not trivial.
And yet the direction of travel matters as much as the current position. Karen Kaiser, senior vice president and general counsel of the Associated Press, described how the AP was ejected from the White House press pool after refusing to use the term “Gulf of America” in place of “Gulf of Mexico” — a decision about editorial independence that led to a lawsuit the AP won at district court level, the US government has appealed, and the decision still pending. The New York Times sued the Pentagon over new rules requiring reporters to sign forms acknowledging that non-classified information they publish could be treated as a security risk; they won, and the Pentagon is appealing that ruling too. “Depending on the issue, often the law is not enough,” said Gallagher. “And many of the countries are not rule-of-law compliant.”
David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel of the New York Times, used a concept borrowed from the historian Timothy Snyder to describe the challenge: “anticipatory obedience.” The real damage of lawfare, he argued, is not always what happens in court. It is the chilling effect — journalists and editors who do not run stories, organizations that do not take on powerful subjects, because the cost of being right and the cost of being wrong have both become unbearable. “There are worse things than losing,” McCraw said. “When we walk away, we let the people in power decide where the lines are for press freedom; that’s a job for a judge.”
The online ground on which lawfare grows
One dimension of this problem that receives less attention than it deserves is the role of online narrative warfare in preparing the conditions for legal attack. Ressa described how, in 2017, the Philippine government seeded the hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa on social media — which she initially dismissed. “Suddenly I was in quicksand.” Gallagher, who led Ressa’s international legal team, confirmed the same pattern in the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia: an online campaign portraying the journalist as a legitimate target preceded the physical and legal attacks against her. “You often see seeding online of a suggestion that the person is a fair target. The person may then be attacked by someone who is ostensibly a private individual but has been given the green light by the government.”
This pipeline — from online smear campaigns to subsequent legal action — is not incidental to lawfare; it is constitutive of its strategic architecture and operational dimensions. As identified by the Lawfare Against Journalism Project within the broader lawfare literature, the use of media to target and discredit opponents is a central strategy. Within this framework, tactics categorized as “externalities” include propaganda, manipulation of public opinion, and forms of information warfare.
Why existing tools are not enough — and what the research response looks like
The EU Anti-SLAPP Directive represents a genuine step forward. But Charlie Holt, European lead for Global Climate Legal Defense (CliDef), was blunt about its limits: “An incomplete instrument filled with ambiguities, so we need strong strategic cases reaching court.” He called on policymakers to “stop being so timid,” pointing to implementations in Malta, the UK, and Ireland that have layered so many tests and thresholds on defendants that the protections are largely inaccessible. Instead, he said, we need “bold, simple laws — and we need them now.”
Partly, this is a matter of political will. Partly, it is a matter of knowledge. And this is where the research community has a role to play.
The Lawfare Against Journalism project, launched during a parallel session at the festival, is an interdisciplinary effort bringing together scholars, lawyers, journalists, and advocacy groups to do something that has not yet been done systematically: map the problem. Using computational social science methods alongside traditional legal and journalistic analysis, the project aims to build a comprehensive database drawing on repositories from CPJ, the Latam Journalism Review, the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism (Abraji) SLAPPs monitor, and elsewhere, and to triangulate these with media coverage of the cases. The goal is to make patterns visible — to identify the signatures of lawfare in data, so that lawyers can build stronger cases, policymakers can design better protections, and journalists can recognize what is happening to them before they are already deep in quicksand.
The research questions guiding the project are deliberately broad: Where is lawfare being used against media organizations and journalists? Who are the agents? How does it differ from traditional SLAPPs across different political contexts? What typologies of legal repression exist across democracies, semi-authoritarian, and authoritarian settings? And, crucially: what mechanisms can protect journalism from legal intimidation?
One immediate practical output the team is working towards is a glossary — a controlled vocabulary of terms that allows lawyers, researchers, and journalists to identify and communicate what is happening to them when no single headline-grabbing violation has occurred, but something is clearly being done. As Ressa put it when the project’s data methodology was discussed: “You have to decide a lexicon.” The battle, in a sense, begins with naming.
The stakes
It would be easy to read all of this as a problem for journalists — a professional hazard for a particular industry. It is not. An attack on a journalist is an attack on the function of journalism, which is to say an attack on the informational infrastructure of democratic life. Gallagher’s observation that the enemies of press freedom “are organized and work together” is worth sitting with. The discrediting playbook used against Ressa in Manila has been applied against media targets in Guatemala, Hong Kong, and Malta. The foreign agent laws pioneered in Russia have been reproduced in Georgia, Hungary, and elsewhere. The ecosystem-strangulation tactics used against environmental lawyers in one context are now being deployed against press-freedom lawyers in another.
What has been missing, until recently, is a commensurate degree of organization, solidarity, and evidence on the other side. “Those of us in big media who have resources need to fight fights for smaller organizations,” McCraw argued. “We need to be trailblazers and establish laws that help everyone.”
The worst response to lawfare, in Snyder’s framing that McCraw invoked, is to obey in advance — to internalize the limits that the powerful are trying to impose and to stop pushing against them before the court has had a chance to rule. Ressa, facing a potential prison sentence, a Nobel Prize, and a company that still cannot easily open a bank account, has not done that. The question is whether the institutions and systems that surround journalism — legal, academic, civic — can get organized quickly enough to matter.
Authorship
This piece was collaboratively authored by Lúcia Mesquita, Principal Investigator of the Lawfare Against Journalism project; Stephen Wolgast and Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos, Co-Principal Investigators; and Daniel Carey, Postdoctoral Researcher at Dublin City University’s School of Communications and a supporter of the project. All four authors participated in the 20th International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April 2026.
References
Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (2007). Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. University of Chicago Press.
Council of the EU. (2024, March 19). Anti-SLAPP: Final green light for EU law protecting journalists and human rights defenders. Consilium. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024/03/19/anti-slapp-final-green-light-for-eu-law-protecting-journalists-and-human-rights-defenders/
Directive (EU) 2024/1069 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 April 2024 on Protecting Persons Who Engage in Public Participation from Manifestly Unfounded Claims or Abusive Court Proceedings (‘Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation’), 2024/1069, EP, CONSIL (2024). http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1069/oj
Journalism and the law: Standing together against rising intimidation. (n.d.). [Video recording]. Retrieved April 27, 2026, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8dRHowqk3s
International Journalism Festival. (2026, April 17). AI-assisted gender-based violence [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THt9eDVKjXI
Martins, C. Z., Martins, V. T. Z., & Valim, R. (2019). Lawfare: Uma introdução. Editora Contracorrente.
Rožukalne, A., Stakle, A., & Skulte, I. (2025). Between Institutional Inertia and Systemic Vulnerability: Understanding Invisible Threats to Journalists’ Safety. Comunicação e Sociedade, (48), Article 48.
