Short Abstract

This panel explores carceral geographies in Africa, examining how prisons, detention centres, borders and surveillance systems produce spaces of confinement and regulate mobility. It foregrounds African perspectives on how carceral spaces shape daily experiences, governance, power and social control

Long Abstract

Carceral geography offers a critical lens for examining how space, power, mobility and confinement are produced and experienced. In African contexts, carceral spaces extend beyond prisons to include immigration detention facilities, border zones, policing, broader surveillance systems, and other sites through which movement is regulated and populations are governed. These spaces are embedded within broader histories of colonialism and postcolonial state formation, governance, migration and border control, and social inequality. Examining them spatially therefore provides important insights into how incarceration and other forms of confinement are organised, experienced and reproduced across the continent.

This panel invites empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions investigating carceral geographies across Africa and its diasporic connections. It approaches prisons and other carceral institutions not simply as sites of confinement, but as socially, politically, and materially constituted spaces that shape relationships between individuals, institutions, communities, and wider society. Contributions may explore the spatial organisation, material conditions, and experiences of incarceration, institutional life, immigration detention and border regimes, surveillance and policing, restricted mobility, relationships between carceral institutions and surrounding communities, gendered and differentiated experiences of confinement, transnational aspects of incarceration, and the wider social ramifications of incarceration, detention, and surveillance.

Bringing together perspectives from migration and mobility studies, human geography, sociology, criminology, anthropology, political science, and related disciplines, the panel foregrounds African-centred experiences and knowledge. It asks how attention to space can deepen understanding of incarceration, mobility, and social control in Africa, while interrogating whose experiences, representations, and knowledge shape the production and interpretation of carceral spaces

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