This chapter transects and articulates different disciplines and lines of thought in order to understand what the redefinitions of the boundaries of political power in times of COVID-19 are, and which practices may outlive the potential normalisation of the crisis, even after vaccines are developed and distributed widely. While referring to the habitus inspired by Bourdieu and paying specific attention to legal practices, it reinforces an articulation that is often missing in strictly Foucauldian approaches between a reflection in terms of governmentality and an analysis of practices of bureaucratic fields. At the core of the discussion on the impact of COVID-19 on freedom, security and democracy lies the question of the type of politics that most states have pursued to generate compliance. This might be obedience and resistance, which involves the introduction of emergency public health policies that, while being different from each other in certain aspects, have been driven more by nationalistic agendas than by a common analysis of the pandemic itself. Based on this politics of obedience and resistance, we claim that the governments from differing parts of the political spectrum under examination here (EU countries, the UK, and Turkey) have tried to convince their populations that pandemic emergency measures are for their own good, by playing on their unease. It is neither a politics of protection led by care, nor a politics of fear and terror implying coercion, nudging and developing an illiberal regime. Rather, it is an original form of governmentality by unease (Bigo, 2002) that creates illiberal practices inside liberal regimes while operating on the basis of personal choices, bureaucratic fights and territorialised forms of modern state sovereignty. Even in Turkey, this form of governmentality respects formal representative democracy. But the fundamental freedoms and basic principle of the rule of law are subverted by the development of horizontalised suspicion that fosters the use of technologies of surveillance and digital predictive analytics. We may not be sleepwalking into an Orwellian society. Nevertheless, a liquid type of surveillance, that is peer- to- peer – DIY surveillance to quote Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman and Lyon, 2013) – is propagated in the name of protection of the self and the others.