Sovereignty, Normalisation and the Unknown: Emergency Governance and Mobility in Central and Eastern Europe in Times of Geopolitical Upheaval

Reflections on the implications of governments’ preferences for emergency solutions typically focus around narratives of democratic erosion and the logic of the “state of exception”. The ambition of this article is to advance these reflections by examining emergency governance not only as a logic of power, but also as a set of political practices experienced by societies living under conditions of sustained emergency. It also seeks to move beyond the typical Western model of sovereignty. This article examines emergency governance in the context of mobility and migration regulations in Poland and Ukraine. Poland has faced a series of mobility-related emergencies since 2020, while Ukraine has been engaged in an unjust war against an external aggressor for the past three years. The article discusses the emergency governance of both countries across three dimensions: 1) within the context of sovereignty in a turbulent geopolitical landscape; 2) further conceptualising blurred boundaries between normality and exception; 3) studying the state’s approach to knowledge and ignorance in times of upheaval.