“The Bureaucratic Toolkit of Emergency” tracks how the bureaucratic toolkit of emergency developed between the two world wars. Focusing on India as the central case, it follows the making of blacklists and suspect lists, the proliferation of disturbed areas and closed zones, exit permits, mobility regimes, and registration practices of foreigners. It then traces how these practices diffused through the horizontal circuits of empire to Palestine and Cyprus, in times of crises, forming a conceptual grid of bureaucratic classifications of mobility according to suspicion, and differentiated practices to manage the fluid and changing categories of those designated as “dangerous populations.”

Democracies and autocracies could be found pursuing many different strategies, and left and right did not line up consistently behind any particular approach. But that does not mean that politics were not important in deciding how to tackle the pandemic. Because the only available tactics interfered in people’s lives, prevention was inherently political. Some were inconvenienced by quarantines, isolation, and lockdowns so that others might be spared. How many and for how long depended on the nature of the precise strategies chosen. All nations had the legal powers to impose as strict measures as they wanted, but only some considered themselves able to make radical demands of their citizens. Most well-off nations of the West decided that they could afford the economic and social costs of shutdown. But some politicians feared that hardships imposed on the poorest would be less tolerable even than the ravages of a pandemic. Sweden was an outlier here. It took a very hands-off approach, making few demands of its citizens, whom it considered able to take the necessary precautions on their own, without being commanded or forced.

By examining laws, legislation, and legal processes, it is argued in chapter five that the legal system in Bahrain is becoming an increasingly comprehensive tool of repression. Despite the increasing standardisation of law, the arbitrary nature of its execution during political unrest highlights the continuity of particularistic features of tribal law embedded within a standardised system.Also, legal repression has been facilitated by the emergence of specific legal structures and processes. As a consequence, laws have often been enacted as reactionary measures to con-trol dissent, long outliving their initial utility while simultaneously generating future grievances. The extent of impunity as an enabling factor for repression is also investigated and highlighted. In particular, a re-examination of historical sources sheds new light on the trial of the al-Madani killers in 1977, and the trial of the Khawalid shaykhsin the 1920s. While the emergence of ‘rule by law’ instead of ‘rule of law’ is implicit, this chapter sheds light on the nuances within even those repressive authoritarian legal processes.