Cities across the MENA region are usually conceptualized as bounded (and disempowered) places contained within a system of bounded states, yet sharing a particular meta-region quality of ‘Middle Eastness’. An alternative applies a relational urban lens, backgrounding ‘the state’, borders and identity in preference for understanding cities as emergent assemblages within relational urbanism. Cities are thus (always) interlinked within an (always) evolving, fluid multiscalar network of relations with other local sites in various ways. We can thus parse out particular emergent urban assemblages, sub-assemblages, and sites, examining their component parts, the processes of relating that ‘produces’ them, their coherence over time, and what political consequences or causal power emerge from their assembling. Foucault proposed that there is a carceral archipelago, a carceral network, a carceral city system of institutions of supervision/constraint, of discreet surveillance and insistent coercion, a material framework, dispersed but coherent, stretching across the social body. Borrowing this argument, I explore punitive urbanism stretched across, entangling and materializing the MENA region, tracing various processes and components assembling its cities together into ‘a MENA Carceral City’. Transcending traditional state boundaries or regulation, this Carceral City interlinks spaces, agents, technologies, materiality, social imaginaries, subjectivities, norms, knowledge and performances to ‘police’ this regional urban assemblage running from Casablanca and Benghazi to Gaza, Aden, Raqqa, Haifa, Khartoum, Tehran, Diyarbakir, Jenin and Manama. Individuals, institutions, subjectivities, spaces and communities are imprisoned, rendered, disappeared, housed in supermax institutions, tortured and disciplined via policing mechanisms and practices which interconnect regimes, urban conurbations, actors and certain core urban centres beyond the geographic region (e.g. Washington, London, Moscow, Beijing) into a political assembly of intervention praxis emergent from strategically distributed multiscalar human and material elements. The paper lays out the theoretical argument; reviews ‘components’ and mechanisms of this assembling [spaces, agents, technologies, performances, and imaginaries] through comparative urban examples; then concludes by assessing how policing the MENA Carceral City shapes other urban assemblages beyond this carceral assemblage.