The first substantial study of emergency law's relationship to literature in either the Northern Irish or the Kashmiri conflict, this book develops an original legal history that links these laws to a shared British colonial root. Engaging a wide range of fiction, poetry and film, from canonical poets Seamus Heaney and Agha Shahid Ali to contemporary works by Anna Burns, Mirza Waheed, and Bollywood filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj, the book examines the literary response to the suspension of normative legal rights such as habeas corpus , the right to silence and even, in Kashmir, the right to life. By bringing these literary cultures together for the first time, it develops a literary and legal history that reveals common roots in colonial-era jurisprudence. The book re-situates these corpora, often isolated in scholarly work, as important parts of the global, material legacies of colonialism.