States of emergency and human rights are undoubtedly opposed to each other: where a state of emergency is declared, fundamental human rights that are guaranteed are restricted or suspended. This book develops the thesis that this opposition becomes understandable only against the backdrop of a fundamental commonality that is also constitutive for the functioning of modern law. Until now, commonalities between the two phenomena have primarily been seen in that they each reduce the individual to their mere physicality. In this sense, Giorgio Agamben, drawing on Hannah Arendt, has suggested in his work on states of emergency and human rights the same logic that constitutes sovereignty: the emergence of a 'bare' life, stripped of any political quality and reduced to mere body. The author pursues an opposing approach: the connection.