States of emergency are usually approached separately in social, political, and economic policy spheres while they are generally tied to a concrete time frame: security, disasters, and economic crises are portrayed as discrete emergencies occupying specific periods. This paper shows that seemingly different and sometimes contradictory processes of states of emergency often intertwine with each other despite their variegated domains, scales, reasonings, and political endeavors. Moreover, their legacies and origins are found in the broader history of articulation of new forms of governance and accumulation of wealth. The paper presents two cases in Turkey that differ in terms of the violence they entailed while both exploited the same emergency declaration against disasters and the new Law No. 6306 on land grabbing. The first is a series of spectacular incidents in the southeastern Kurdish city of Diyarbakır and the second is an ethnographic study from Eskişehir, a mundane setting in western Anatolia. The study develops a historical–relational framework to examine how emergency governance operates through dual, interwoven logics of ruling and capital accumulation. This allows us to move beyond ready-made, reductionist understandings of contemporary emergency governance. Discerning institutionalization of states of emergency also shows their fragility and blurs the line between spectacular and non-spectacular.

This article analyses the constitutional framework regulating states of emergency in Poland and addresses key issues related to their interpretation and implementation. The first part discusses the conditions for declaring martial law, a state of an extraordinary situation, and a state of natural disaster, as well as the specific rules for the operation of public authorities in such emergencies. The next part analyses the practice, revealing the consistent reluctance of Polish authorities to invoke states of emergency, even in circumstances that seem to justify such measures. Consequently, a state of emergency under the 1997 Constitution was declared in Poland only once – in 2021, in response to a migration crisis on the border with Belarus. No constitutional emergency was declared during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the introduction of far-reaching restrictions on individual rights and freedoms. The article argues that state authorities can abuse emergency regulations, either through their unjustified application or by deliberately circumventing them.