Hybrid warfare blurs the line between war and peace. Hostile states and their proxies use a mix of tools, including disinformation, cyber operations, election interference, economic coercion, and sabotage of critical infrastructure, to weaken their rivals while staying below the threshold of armed conflict. One of the least understood of these tools is lawfare: a threat actor turning a country’s own domestic legal system against it. Lawfare exploits the courts, regulatory processes, and legal protections that open societies rely on, and uses them to harass critics, tie up institutions, shape public debate, and erode trust in the rule of law.

In this conversation, Professor Alkon and Jeanette Stovel will look at how lawfare works in practice and why democracies are especially exposed to it. They’ll place lawfare within the wider landscape of current hybrid threats facing Canada, the United States, and their allies. They’ll also ask how democratic states can build legal resilience without giving up the openness and due-process values that make them targets in the first place. 

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*This Event is open to all members of the community, including students, professors, staff and the general public. A light meal will be provided for those who register.

Bio:

Cynthia Alkon is a Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Law, Justice & Policy Program at Texas A&M University School of Law. She is a Senior Fellow and Steering Committee Member of the Council on Countering Hybrid Warfare. Her scholarship addresses hybrid warfare, comparative criminal procedure, and dispute resolution in the criminal legal system, with a focus on plea bargaining. Professor Alkon is the co-author, with Andrea Kupfer Schneider, of Negotiating Crime: Plea Bargaining, Problem Solving, and Dispute Resolution in the Criminal Context.

In 2024, she developed and taught an interdisciplinary course on Conflict Management and Hybrid Warfare. In Spring/Summer 2026, she taught a course on Energy Security and Hybrid Warfare with Professor Guillermo Sanchez Garcia. This course included a two week field component in Paris, Brussels and Lyon.

Before entering academia, Professor Alkon served as a deputy public defender in Los Angeles County and held senior rule-of-law positions with the American Bar Association (in Belarus) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) (in Albania), and at the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, where she was the head of the Rule of Law Unit and oversaw criminal justice reform projects across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.