II. Outsourcing Violence: The UK's Border Externalisation Plan in the Balkans - Tools of Outsourcing
If Stage 1 shows how pressure is generated inside the UK asylum system, Stage 2 shows how that pressure is turned into something much larger: a transnational architecture of control. This is the stage where externalisation stops being a political slogan and becomes a working system made up of partnerships, funding, surveillance, and diplomacy. The report argues that the UK is not simply trying to “solve” migration management problems. It is building an infrastructure that pushes responsibility outward and makes coercion easier to hide.
This matters because externalisation is often described as if it begins at the border. In reality, it is assembled long before a person reaches a checkpoint, a reception centre, or a return hub. The report shows that the UK’s approach to the Western Balkans sits inside a wider shift toward deterrence and crimmigration, where migration control increasingly borrows from criminal law, policing, and security practice. Once that logic is in place, detention, deportation, data-sharing, and offshore processing start to look like ordinary policy tools rather than exceptional measures.
The evidence in the report makes this architecture visible. The UK has been deepening cooperation with Balkan states through border training, intelligence-sharing, security funding, and anti-smuggling operations. It has also worked with Frontex and the International Organization for Migration, while supporting regional projects that strengthen migration control capacity. On paper, these arrangements are presented as cooperation on organized crime and “irregularized” migration. In practice, they create the political and operational conditions for externalised control.
A key point here is that externalisation does not rely on one dramatic deal. It grows through a sequence. First comes security cooperation and capacity-building. Then comes diplomatic alignment and shared enforcement priorities. Only after that does the conversation move toward return hubs, readmission, and offshore processing. That sequence matters because it shows how control is normalised step by step. By the time a return hub is proposed, the infrastructure around it has already been laid.
The report is especially clear that return hubs are not just administrative spaces. They are part of a broader political logic that relocates people, but also relocates responsibility. These hubs are not yet fully defined in law, which gives them a troubling flexibility. Their location, length of stay, legal safeguards, and oversight would all depend on bilateral agreements, meaning that people could be held in prolonged uncertainty with limited access to challenge. In other words, the legal ambiguity is not a flaw in the model — it is part of how the model works.
This is where the Balkans become central. The report traces UK engagement with Albania, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo, showing that the region is being drawn into a wider border-control agenda. Some states have resisted the idea of hosting return hubs, while others have signaled conditional openness. But even where no formal deal exists, the policy language is already spreading. That alone is important, because externalisation often advances through normalization before it advances through implementation.
The report also shows how the UK is using broader security cooperation to make these arrangements more viable. Border officers have been deployed, equipment has been shared, and funding has been directed toward projects tied to illicit finance, organized crime, and people-smuggling networks. These measures are presented as pragmatic and protective. Yet they also build the practical machinery that return hubs would need in order to function. What looks like regional cooperation is also a way of extending UK border power beyond UK territory.
Another important dimension is that the architecture is not only political, but technical. Surveillance systems, biometric tools, data-sharing arrangements, and risk profiling all help turn migration governance into a system that is harder to challenge and easier to expand. This is one of the report’s most important insights: externalisation is not just about moving people. It is about moving the tools of control with them, while keeping accountability fragmented across institutions and borders.
The report also makes clear that private actors play a major role in this process. Contractors, security firms, and technology providers are already embedded in the broader border regime, from policing and accommodation to data and logistics. That means externalisation is not only a state project. It is also a commercial ecosystem that benefits from the expansion of migration control. The more complex the architecture becomes, the easier it is for responsibility to be dispersed and profit to be extracted.
What makes Stage 2 so revealing is that it shows how externalisation is built before it is ever implemented. The groundwork is laid through partnerships, budgets, and political language that makes offshore control seem normal, inevitable, and even responsible. By the time a person is transferred into a return hub, the coercive pathway has already been assembled through layers of diplomacy and security cooperation. The border has already moved outward.
The next blog post will look at what happens when this architecture lands in the Balkans, and how return hubs would interact with detention and border regimes already marked by abuse, weak oversight, and legal precarity.
Words by Anna Gruber, Advocacy Manager