Boundaries, obligations and belonging: The reconfiguration of citizenship in emergency criminal regimes

Abstract

In national emergencies, states may establish special criminal regimes that criminalize behaviours legal under ordinary law, use more oppressive measures of enforcement and reduce procedural rights. Scholars associate such regimes with the exclusion of offenders from the political community. However, in some emergency criminal regimes, often dealing with economic crises and recently with pandemics, the reduction of rights can also imply inclusion. By examining two emergency regimes in Israel in 1948, a military regime imposing movement restrictions on the Palestinian minority, and an austerity regime imposing restrictions on trade in food products on all citizens, the article argues that different emergency criminal regimes can affect two different tenets of ordinary criminal law: the reinforcing of the boundaries of the community, and the set of obligations between members of that community. Hence, such regimes can foster multiple configurations of citizenship. When simultaneously enforced on marginalized groups, they render their citizenship equivocal.