Prisons, detention centres, borders, walls, fences, checkpoints, surveillance and biometrics: everywhere their presence is intensifying as part of an ever-more complex web of enclosures, as states and private industry accelerate a centuries-long project to dominate the world’s productive forces. While offering a modicum of freedom to a privileged few workers in the world’s urban core, this system depends on the presence of a permanently precarious population. In this special series, we explore the spatial mechanisms that have facilitated this regime of enclosure and incarceration, from the colonial logics that have taken hold over the past several centuries, to contemporary neoliberal machinations driven by profit extraction and the movement of global finance capital.