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The law of war is a weapon for the powerful

In an age of asymmetric warfare, "Lawfare" is an emerging branch of modern combat, which has been defined by the Council on Foreign Relations as the "strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve military objectives." Several writers have referred to it by turning the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz's celebrated quote on its head, calling it "a continuation of warfare by political or legal means."

Though international law and the Geneva Convention - its flagship piece of legislation - do provide an essential framework which outlaws torture, bans the most horrific of weapons and specifies that civilians have to be protected during conflict, it has come under criticism for its flexibility, and the ease with which powerful governments can twist the small print or, as happened when the Bush administration set up Guantanamo, find loopholes which apparently allow them to disregard it altogether.

But others, including many on the American right, have pointed out that there's a flipside to lawfare, in that the possibility of litigation allows America's opponents to further their own military aims by criticising the US's human rights record, or by taking a matter to court as a delaying tactic. So who does it benefit the most: the right or the left, the strong or the weak?