“The Bureaucratic Toolkit of Emergency” tracks how the bureaucratic toolkit of emergency developed between the two world wars. Focusing on India as the central case, it follows the making of blacklists and suspect lists, the proliferation of disturbed areas and closed zones, exit permits, mobility regimes, and registration practices of foreigners. It then traces how these practices diffused through the horizontal circuits of empire to Palestine and Cyprus, in times of crises, forming a conceptual grid of bureaucratic classifications of mobility according to suspicion, and differentiated practices to manage the fluid and changing categories of those designated as “dangerous populations.”