Soft authoritarian lawfare. Threats to democracy from within

Analyses of hybrid threats usually focus on perils to liberal democracies that originate from the outside. They seem to overlook, however, that an external hybrid threat may present the opportunity to hollow out, or even dismantle, liberal democratic institutions and values from within. Against the backdrop of the developments that blur the boundaries between external and internal threats, we offer an alternative reading that complicates our understanding of hybrid threats. We use ethnographic material on Poland to locate hybrid threats not merely in the activities of external actors that aim to unsettle democratic societies but to broaden the concept to also include practices of domestic authorities to dismantle democracies from within. In this chapter we analyse these strategies as examples of soft authoritarian lawfare, which are currently being deliberately deployed to transform liberal democracies across the globe.