How can literature and culture from the postcolonial world help us to understand the relationship between law and violence associated with a state of emergency? And what light can legal narratives of emergency shed on postcolonial writing? States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law examines how violent anti-colonial struggles and the legal, military and political techniques employed by colonial governments to contain them have been imagined in literature and law. Through a series of case studies, the book considers how colonial states of exception have been defined and represented in the contexts of Ireland, India, South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, and Israel-Palestine, and concludes with an assessment of the continuities between these colonial states of emergency and the ‘wars on terror’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan. By doing so, the book considers how techniques of sovereignty, law and violence are reconfigured in the colonial present.