Legal regimes dealing with security have prominent temporal attributes: they are often intended to operate for a specified period of time in response to an imminent danger and allow governments to employ extraordinary measures enabling them to act faster when faced with time-critical scenarios. Such regimes also have prominent spatial attributes: they often protect a physical border, delineate spaces with extra-legal status, or use surveillance measures such as cameras or patrols for monitoring designated areas. Based on the analysis of one security regime that was imposed on the Palestinian minority in Israel between 1948 and 1966, I argue in this article that such spatial and temporal attributes affect each other and that different legal measures associated with security can be characterized by the specific time/space configuration – or chronotope – embedded in them. In Israel, a military regime was imposed on specific areas to foil the movement of its subjects and thereby further its territorial objectives. The procedures that the regime employed were therefore designed to monitor and control individuals’ whereabouts. Each of these seemingly spatial attributes, however, gained its particular function and meaning from a specific interaction with temporal attributes. The prism of the chronotope illuminates how security legal measures generate distinct modes of governance and produce different boundaries to the political community, in a way that a one-dimensional analysis fails to capture.

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.

This article examines the legal constructs governing the use of violent interrogation methods in Israel since 1987. It explores the shift from a sweeping suspension of the prohibition on torture to a fractured legal regime in which the different elements of interrogation—the perpetrator, the victim, the time of the interrogation, and the space in which it takes place—are effectively excluded from the prohibition on torture by means of separate legal constructs. I show how each of these constructs creates a narrow, seemingly proportional exception to ordinary law. Together, the four types of exception facilitate the sanctioning of state violence. I use this case to analyze the available configurations of the state of exception, distinguishing them from each other by what they exclude from ordinary law. By showing how the proliferation of legal constructs produces an entire ecosystem of different exceptions, I point to the inherent link between the suspension of the law and its proliferation: both create legal categories that rationalize and legitimize state violence.

Both territoriality and political status serve as parameters for determining the extent of a state's obligation to uphold human rights. Scholars have shown that different actors may manipulate the scope of these parameters to serve their particular purposes. Based on interviews with lawyers from Israeli human rights organizations, this article shows how they also manipulate the relationships between these parameters. When representing different clients, lawyers from Israeli human rights organizations accentuate one parameter over the other, demand congruity between them, or reject both. The findings highlight how the movable intersections between territoriality and political status facilitate a multitude of discursive strategies from which lawyers can pick and choose, to address political predicaments they face in their praxis. Furthermore, by judiciously applying these strategies, lawyers are able to mobilize the indeterminate relationship between political status and territoriality to destabilize what they perceive to be the unjust boundaries promoted by the state.