Análise da significação e do tema da palavra lawfare em textos de autores da área jurídica

Abstract

The objective of this research is to clarify the communicative purpose of the use of the word lawfare by authors in the legal field.Therefore, it is part of the objective of thisacademic workto answer which contexts the term lawfare evokes, how itis constructed and reconstructed in the legaldiscoursein order to understand what would be the meaning and theme of the lawfare sign, based on its origin,history,andpast and contemporary instrumentalization. To carry out the research, a legal corpus was usedthat includes texts by sevenauthors published between 1975 and 2019. In other words, this research includesthe first use of the term and its recent uses, thus highlighting the relevance of the historical and social context in the study of lawfare. The corpus was mapped, and data on lawfare were organized so that, in the light of Bakhtinian thinking, they could be analyzed. Therefore, the concepts of meaning and theme linked to the idea of sign, utterance and genre of discourse proposed by the Circle served as theoretical basis for this research.It was observed that the lawfare, in containing the accumulation of themes given to the words war and law / law, shows a microcosm of ideological disputes. Which can and continues to be used as a weapon / instrument to harm those who criticize state authorities. A state is able to use lawfare to obtain advantages in the military or political field. The word lawfare is an arena for confrontation between different valuative horizons. Being an ideological sign, the enunciation of lawfare is never neutral. This fact suggests the variety of themes in dispute and the instability of their meaning. Lawfare being a recent neologism and a sign with relatively unstable significance, there is an intense thematic struggle for the conceptualization of the word.