Emergency is not the exception.
—peoplelive under a declared state of emergency, martial law, or emergency decree: powers that suspend ordinary constitutional protection and concentrate authority in the executive.
Each square is one percent of the world's population.
Where emergency powers are in force
Every country currently governing under a declared state of emergency, martial law, state of siege, or equivalent decree, coloured by the justification given. Select a country for its full profile.
Shading indicates a declaration recorded by at least one of our sources and not since rescinded. Countries in grey have no declaration on record, which is not the same as having none. See methods and limitations.
Emergencies begin as episodes and end as institutions
What defines the modern state of exception is how long it lasts. The charts below track duration, timing, and the kinds of states that govern this way.
The longest-running emergencies
Years elapsed since the declaration currently in force took effect.
Declarations by year
When the emergencies on record were first declared, including lapsed ones. Bars show new declarations; the line shows the running total.
Who governs by emergency
Share of countries under a declared emergency, grouped by political regime type (V-Dem classification via Our World in Data).
Duration against democracy
Each dot is a country under emergency, placed by its electoral democracy score and how long its emergency has run. Dot size reflects population.
Grounds for declaration
Emergencies by stated justification, with the population governed under each.
By region
Countries under emergency by world region.
What happens to rights once the emergency is in force
A declaration is a legal act with a date. That makes it possible to ask what the liberties it suspends looked like the year before, and what they look like now. For the countries on the register whose declarations V-Dem's coding window covers, the answer is a decline almost everywhere, and in a few cases a collapse.
Freedom of expression, before the declaration and now
Each row runs from the country's score in the last full year before its declaration took effect to its most recent score. The V-Dem indices run 0 to 1 and higher means more freedom, so a marker that has moved left is a loss of liberty. This is what changed alongside the emergency, not what the emergency caused, and the baseline year differs by country because the declarations do.
Covers the countries on the register with a declaration date and V-Dem coverage of the year before it. Countries whose declaration predates the retained series, or is too recent for a completed year of coding, are absent from the chart rather than shown at zero. Indices are V-Dem via Our World in Data.
Crisis and emergency are different things
Most countries in acute humanitarian crisis have declared no emergency at all, and some countries under emergency face no crisis our sources can detect. The mismatch is the point: declarations track politics at least as closely as they track need.
A country counts as in crisis if it has an ongoing ReliefWeb disaster, an active GDACS alert, recorded ACLED conflict activity, or a place on the IRC Emergency Watchlist. Absence of a crisis marker means these automated sources flagged nothing, not that nothing is happening. The map answers yes or no; the two charts below put a number on it.
The most severe crises, and who has declared
The worst crises now running, scored by ACAPS on the INFORM Severity Index. The scale runs 1 to 10 and higher means more severe. Bars are coloured by whether the country has a declaration on the register.
Risk and severity are different questions
INFORM Risk asks how likely a future crisis is to overwhelm a country; INFORM Severity asks how bad the crises already running are. Both run 0 to 10 and on both higher is worse. Each dot is one of the countries scored on both, coloured by declaration status.
Every country on the register
Sort, filter, and search the full dataset. Each row opens a country profile joining the declaration to population, governance, displacement, hazard, and news data.
| Country | Grounds | Declaration | Since | Duration | Population | Democracy | Severity | Expression Δ | Status |
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The two newest columns point in opposite directions, so read them separately. Severity is the INFORM Severity Index: 1 to 10, higher is worse, and blank where ACAPS scores no crisis rather than a crisis of zero. Expression Δ is the change in V-Dem's freedom of expression index since the year before the declaration, on an index running 0 to 1 where higher means more freedom — so a negative figure is a loss of liberty, and a blank means V-Dem does not cover a full year before that declaration. Both columns are in the CSV below, alongside OONI's network interference rates, which stay in the country profiles rather than the table because a single sortable number cannot carry the caveat they need.
Declarations, extensions, and developments
Matched items from humanitarian reporting, human rights monitors, UN agencies, and regional news wires, filtered to emergency-related language.
How this is built
Every figure here is generated by an open pipeline from public sources. Nothing is hand-entered except documented corrections.
Sources feeding this page
What counts as a state of emergency. A state of exception, whether called a state of emergency, martial law, a state of siege, or an emergency decree, is a legal mechanism by which a government suspends ordinary constitutional protections and concentrates power in the executive. We record a country as under emergency when at least one source documents a declaration in force that has not been rescinded.
Scope. Declarations are classified as national, regional, or local. Regional declarations, such as a state of siege confined to particular provinces, are issued by national governments exercising emergency powers, so they count toward the register and are marked regional wherever they appear. Declarations issued by a municipal or city government are kept on record but do not make their country count as under emergency, since a town council invoking emergency powers is not a state of exception at the national level.
Verification. Each entry carries a confidence score. Verified means confirmed by multiple independent sources or by manual review (90% or above). Likely active means strong but incomplete evidence (75–89%). Unconfirmed means a single source or ageing data (50–74%). Entries below 50% are not displayed.
Classification. Declarations are sorted into five grounds (disaster, public health, conflict and security, migration, and governance) by keyword matching against titles and descriptions. The stated ground is what the declaring government claims, which is itself a datum worth reading sceptically, and not an independent judgement of cause.
Population figures. Population living under emergency is the sum of current World Bank population estimates for countries with a national declaration in force. It counts whole national populations and so overstates exposure where a declaration is regionally confined, and understates it where a sub-national declaration is not captured.
Limitations. Automated collection favours English-language and well-documented cases, so coverage is thinnest exactly where press freedom is weakest. Keyword classification occasionally miscategorises. Start dates are sometimes approximate. Treaty derogation notifications may stay on file after an emergency lapses; we correct for this with documented manual overrides. Absence of a country from this register is weak evidence, not strong evidence, that it has no emergency in force.
Update frequency. The pipeline is run periodically and the generation timestamp for the data on this page is shown in the header. If it is more than two days old, the header says so.
Download the data
Everything on this page is published as flat tables, nested JSON, and a single queryable database, all under CC BY 4.0. Every table joins on iso3.
Start here
The country panel is one row per country with every indicator joined: emergency status, population, economy, governance, democracy, displacement, crisis, hazards, advisories, and treaty derogations.
Every table
| Dataset | Unit | Rows | Columns | Download |
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