Coauthored with Stephanie Leutert

A large, powerful organization with enormous influence over public debate is stifling discussion of an important national security issue. It has censored emerging ideas by prominent intellectuals and practitioners in the field. It makes irrational, outdated choices about what sources constitute acceptable reading for the public’s delicate eyes. Its conservatism about reputation and sources stifles the contribution of new media to the discussion—and thus has the effect of perpetuating stale ideas.

We’re not talking about the CIA, the NSA, the military, or the media.

We’re talking, of course, about Wikipedia.

In June 2012, we tried to edit the crowd-sourced encyclopedia’s entry on the word “lawfare”—a portmanteau of the words “law” and “warfare” which has come to refer, broadly speaking, to the use of law as a weapon of war. One of us (Wittes) is a co-founder and the editor in chief of the Lawfare Blog, a multimedia website devoted to the intersection of national security and law. The other (Leutert) is a research associate at a prominent foreign policy-oriented think tank in New York, who was helping Wittes, on a freelance basis, to develop a separate personal web site and add material to his Wikipedia entry. The goal in editing the “lawfare” entry on Wikipedia was not to advertise the Lawfare Blog—though that certainly would have been a happy collateral outcome. The goal, rather, was to expand the debate on national security and, in particular, the conversation surrounding the term “lawfare,” by incorporating into Wikipedia’s dry and narrow definition of the word some of the rich discussion of the term’s meaning that has taken place on the Lawfare site, where a number of prominent scholars and practitioners have reflected on the word’s meaning.