Modern democratic states often rely on practices of detention and incarceration in order to demonstrate (and increasingly, to circumvent) the power of the rule of law. As a result, international and domestic detention spaces like refugee camps, jails and for-profit prisons, war prisons, black sites, migrant detention islands, border checkpoints, and protest camps are utilized in an ever-expanding number of spatial, legal, and political contexts. Through close reading, focused class discussion, writing, and interacting with assorted primary sources, we will explore these spaces and engage in a detailed historical and theoretical investigation of the complex and often-contradictory processes that produce them.