The permanently retained state of exception expresses settlers’ felt siege even when dominant.

Evidence

In the unhappy oscillation of the idea of Protestantism in Northern Ireland between the name for a secular and progressive civil society and the name of a religious and sectarian identification, the exclusionary nature of the latter continually infects the practices of the civil or civic. … The very fact of its remaining in force meant that Northern Ireland substantially represented a continuation of the British colonial state in Ireland, in which, between 1800 and 1922, over 100 emergency powers or “Coercion Acts” had been declared (Tomlinson 1995, 196). The state of exception is, for all intents and purposes, the legal expression of the psychic “state of siege” that afflicts the settler colonial everywhere and at any moment – that sense of always being in a state of emergency, of being surrounded and endangered even when in command of massive superiority of force. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 2095

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s core question about threat-hardening: legal emergency provisions persist not from objective danger but from manufactured siege identity — directly relevant to whether solidarity decays when threat empties. — connects to: The permanent state of exception predates Nazism in colonial formations. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1753; Settler identity depends constitutively on the colonized it wishes to erase. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2105; The state of exception legally expresses the settler’s psychic siege mentality. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2095
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• The permanent state of exception predates Nazism in colonial formations. #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1753