Drawing on the research of the state of siege legislation and the publications on emergency powers from interwar and World War II Romania, the archival fonds created by the military courts, the police, the gendarmerie, and the Romanian secret services on the state of siege mechanisms, and the testimonies of that period, the research has the following objectives:

to provide a timeline and a cartography of the origins and the uses of the state of siege between 1933 and 1944; this timeline will focus to trace the genealogy of the legislation related to the state of siege mechanisms in interwar Romania and its shifts.

to provide an analysis of the sources of the discourse legitimatizing the use of state of siege mechanisms by focusing on the complex relation between the narratives on the dangers for state security coming from inside or outside the country and the emergency powers.

to analyze how the state of siege mechanisms worked at the central and at the grassroots level within the secret services (“Siguranța” and the SSI), the gendarmerie, and those branches of the military directly involved in implementing the state of siege.

to provide an assessment of how state of siege mechanisms affected everyday life, limited civil rights and contributed to the delegitimization and dismantlement of the liberal order defined by the 1923 Romanian Constitution; this analysis will be carried out by paying attention to the entangled relation between state of siege, the dismantlement of the liberal order, and the rise of authoritarianism in the 1930s.

to assess the role played by state of siege in the emergence and the inner mechanisms of the successive dictatorships of the period 1938-1944; this objective supposes to provide a conceptual map of the relation between the suspension of constitutional guarantees and the far right ideologies of Carolism, Iron Guard and of Antonescu’s military regime; it will also focus on how these dictatorial regimes instrumentalized the discourse on emergency situations in order to legitimize seizing power and perpetrate state political violence; concerning the latter the research will focus on the use of military courts as key institutions of the state of siege mechanisms of King Carol II to Antonescu’s dictatorships.