The group of 27 papers published in this special issue of Nuclear Fusion aims to monitor the worldwide progress made in the period 2008–2010 in the field of thermonuclear fusion. Of these papers, 22 are based on overview reports presented at the 23rd Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2010) and five are summary reports. The conference was hosted by the Republic of Korea and organized by the IAEA in cooperation with the National Fusion Research Institute and the Daejeon Metropolitan City. It took place in Daejeon on 11–16 October 2010. The overviews presented at the conference have been rewritten and extended for the purpose of this special issue and submitted to the standard double-referee peer-review of Nuclear Fusion. The articles are placed in the following sequence:Conference summaries of the sessions devoted to:Tokamak and stellarator experiments, experimental divertor physics and plasma wall interaction experiments, stability experiments and waves and fast particles;ITER activities, fusion technology, safety and economics;Magnetic confinement theory and modelling;Inertial confinement fusion;Innovative confinement concepts, operational scenarios and confinement.Overview articles, presented in programme order, are as follows:TokamaksOverview of KSTAR initial experiments;Recent progress in RF heating and long-pulse experiments on EAST;Overview of JET results;DIII-D contributions toward the scientific basis for sustained burning plasmas;Overview of JT-60U results toward the resolution of key physics and engineering issues in ITER and JT-60SA;Overview of physics results from NSTX;Overview of ASDEX Upgrade results;Overview of physics results from MAST;Contribution of Tore Supra in preparation of ITER;Overview of FTU results;Overview of experimental results on the HL-2A tokamak;Progress and scientific results in the TCV tokamak;Overview of the JT-60SA project;Recent results of the T-10 tokamak;The reconstruction and research progress of the TEXT-U tokamak in China.Other MCFOverview of results from the Large Helical Device;Overview of TJ-II experiments;Overview of the RFX fusion science program.ICFProgress toward ignition on the National Ignition Facility;Studying ignition schemes on European laser facilities;Cross device or cross programme topical overviewsEffects of 3D magnetic perturbations on toroidal plasmas;Toroidal momentum transport.We trust that, as usual, this issue will be a useful resource for the community and we thank all of the authors and referees for their hard work in preparing the papers for publication. Whilst the number of overview reports is the same as for the Geneva FEC special issue (2009 Nucl. Fusion49 100201), we are pleased to note that we have a complete set of summaries in this issue.