a b s t r a c tThe space of exception has been extensively discussed as a location in which governing technologies are deployed through the suspension and manipulation of the norm. The scholarship on the subject has underscored the ways in which various localities can be encamped, which alludes to the dynamic in which spaces of exception can be shaped through the application of various means of sovereign violence that produces new and unpredictable norms. Building on this literature, the article analyzes the ways in which the exception is intentionally used in order to spatially construct the norm. Two case studies are discussed: Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights and the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus. The article's main aim is to show how the state of emergency, which provided the justification for deploying exceptional meansdoccupation and subsequent colonizationdwas domesticated. By domestication I mean a situation whereby the state of emergency is not fully negated, but rather rearticulated and redeployed in order to reshape the space and transform it so that it is concomitantly both threatening and normal. I go on to show, however, how despite the processes of spatial normalization the state of exception always resurfaces.This article examines how occupying forces deploy exceptional means to reconstruct contested territories so as to normalize and in thus way fortify their presence. Analyzing two case studiesdthe Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights and the Turkish occupation of Northern CyprusdI show that the objective of the normalization process has in each case been different. Israel normalized its presence in the Golan in order to incorporate this region into its own territory, while Turkey has been normalizing its presence in Northern Cyprus in order to craft it as Turkish without fully integrating it into its own body politic. However, and despite these differences, a similar rationale has in both cases led the core statesdIsrael and Turkeydto employ a twofold normalization strategy during the conquest and subsequent occupation.On the one hand, the core states accentuated the geostrategic risks (real or constructed) embodied in the territories captured and presented them as constituting a threat that could be dealt with only through the imposition of a state of emergency and the deployment of exceptional means (e.g., ethnic cleansing, widespread destruction). On the other hand, and simultaneously, the core states strove to transform these contested spaces and reproduce them as normal in order to render them non-threatening.In other words, the core states present the spaces they had occupied as both an exception (a threat that needs to be controlled and managed) and simultaneously as normal. Examining how the strategies employed by the occupying states are informed by this tension, I show that the incongruity cannot be fully managed. The fact that these territories are colonized and are therefore constituted as spaces of exception is ultimately re-exposed.Following a brief literature r...