How is urban capital and profit protected in spaces marked by war, insecurity and violence? In Baghdad, part of the answer lies in the relationship between money, infrastructure and privatised order. In this paper, I argue that: 1) urban development has been facilitated by the turn towards private security provision, filling a vacuum created by ineffective state security practices; and 2) political actors who battle over control of the state and its resources have also developed economic interests that are better served by weaker or even absent state security institutions. I show this co-constitution of urban development, private order and political power by zooming in on the affluent western Baghdad district of Mansour – named after the founder of Baghdad, Abu Ja'far al-Mansour. New investment and construction is today re-anchoring Mansour as an upper middle-class entertainment hub; two glitzy shopping malls have opened in the last four years. The area is also notably home to a number of private security companies, international NGOs, embassies and political parties – sites surrounded by Baghdad’s infamously ubiquitous blast walls. I investigate Mansour’s relative safety in comparison to other parts of Baghdad by unpacking the relationship between capital, politics and space. My research ultimately suggests that the sources of the challenge to state power in and around Baghdad are not sectarian but economic, rooted in the privatisation of security. This paper presents ethnographic data from more than 10 months of doctoral fieldwork in Baghdad, primarily open-ended interviews with business owners and developers, property management personnel, site engineers and private security contractors. Complementing interview findings, my participant observation in malls and restaurants uncovers a striking legal geography of security in and across these spaces, namely how private security personnel and infrastructure sit alongside and even compete with public security institutions like military and police. This in turn raises new questions about the power of the Iraqi state, and who controls law, order and violence within popular urban spaces and across Iraq’s capital city.