III. Outsourcing Violence: The UK's Border Externalisation Plan in the Balkans - How It Lands in the Local Context

If the first two stages explain how externalisation is produced, the third stage shows what it does in practice. This is where the UK’s border strategy leaves the level of policy design and becomes a material force in the Balkans, a region already shaped by detention, pushbacks, legal precarity, and weak accountability. The important point is that externalisation does not arrive in neutral territory. It lands in spaces where coercion is already routine, and where states, contractors, and border authorities have long relied on containment as a way of managing migration.

That matters because the rhetoric around return hubs and offshore processing often makes these arrangements sound orderly, pragmatic, and even humane. But the evidence from the Balkans suggests the opposite. Facilities are often overcrowded, understaffed, and poorly monitored; access to interpreters, legal support, healthcare, and outside oversight is limited; and in many cases detention itself is already operating in ways that resemble punishment more than protection. Adding UK return procedures into that environment would not improve conditions. It would give new legitimacy and new resources to systems that are already producing harm.

The regional picture shows how uneven, but deeply concerning, the landscape already is. In Albania, Kareç Detention Centre has been documented for poor sanitary conditions, restricted access to outside space, disrepair, staff shortages, and degrading treatment. Kosovo’s Vranidoll centre is formally a detention site for foreigners, but the broader concern is the closed, carceral nature of the setting and the limited access civil society has to monitor it. Serbia has the most developed detention infrastructure in the region, including Padinska Skela, Dimitrovgrad, and Plandište, alongside standby reception centres that could be quickly reactivated if the political need arises. North Macedonia shows a similar pattern, with Gazi Baba and Vinojug described as restricted, overcrowded, and functionally closed in practice. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro are no better: Lukavica, and Spuž have all been associated with overcrowding, poor sanitation, abuse, and conditions that fall far short of anything that could be called safe or rights-compliant.

The significance of this pattern is not just that these places are bad. It is that they are already part of a wider border regime built on restriction and invisibility. Across the Balkans, pushbacks and chain pushbacks remain a normal method of border management. People trying to seek asylum are often denied access to procedures, pushed back across borders without documentation, or transferred between facilities with little explanation or legal remedy. In Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina especially, the evidence points to repeated beatings, arbitrary detention, theft, humiliation, and other forms of degrading treatment. These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a regional ecology of control in which border violence is routine enough to be predictable.

That is why the language of “safe third country” arrangements is so misleading. Safety is not being discovered in the Balkans through new agreements. It is being asserted into places where the underlying conditions do not support it. The idea that people can simply be moved into these systems and held there while their removals are processed assumes that the legal and institutional infrastructure already exists to protect them. But the evidence shows persistent gaps in legal aid, weak or absent interpretation, limited access to lawyers, and in some cases deliberate obstruction by state authorities. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, civil society access to detention facilities is severely limited, and people in detention are often not told clearly what charges or procedures apply to them. That kind of environment does not support fair process. It produces prolonged uncertainty.

This is where externalisation reveals its deeper function. It does not merely transfer people from one territory to another. It transfers them into a different legal and political landscape where accountability is even harder to enforce. Once people are placed in return hubs or similar offshore arrangements, responsibility becomes diffuse. The sending state can claim it is still operating lawfully, the partner state can present itself as a cooperative host, and the actual person affected is left to navigate a fragmented system with few practical means of challenge. That diffusion is not an accidental side effect. It is one of the central mechanisms that makes externalisation attractive to states in the first place.

The report’s evidence also shows why this is especially dangerous in the Balkans. The region is already under heavy pressure from EU migration policies, border securitisation, and the ongoing externalisation of European control. Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are transit countries with the most developed detention and reception infrastructures, but also with the most visible abuse and overcrowding. Albania’s detention system has been singled out by the Committee for the Prevention of Torture for severe and harmful conditions, and the Italy-Albania arrangement has only heightened concern about how offshore detention can normalise arbitrary confinement. Montenegro and North Macedonia may have smaller systems, but that does not make them safer. It simply means that new externalised arrangements would likely arrive into fragile infrastructures with even less capacity to absorb them.

There is also a political dimension to this. Externalisation is often presented as cooperation, capacity-building, or regional alignment. But in practice it tends to reward states that accept more restrictive border practices and deeper surveillance cooperation. That creates a perverse incentive structure. Countries facing pressure from the EU, the UK, or both may be encouraged to expand detention, tighten asylum access, and tolerate abuses in order to remain useful partners in migration governance. In that sense, externalisation does not just intensify existing harms. It can also entrench the political conditions that allow those harms to continue.

Another danger lies in the way return hubs can normalize detention as the default response to people whose claims have not yet been fully resolved or whose legal status is still in motion. The report points out that offshore arrangements create a strong likelihood of prolonged or even indefinite detention, especially where return is delayed or impossible. That is especially troubling in contexts where detention is already poorly regulated. People may be held for months or years with limited access to challenge their confinement, while the formal language of temporary processing masks what is effectively indefinite containment. In some models, such as Australia’s offshore regime, detention has stretched to extraordinary lengths. The concern is not hypothetical. Once a system is built to hold people outside the territory where their rights are easiest to claim, the logic of release becomes weaker and weaker.

This also raises the issue of legal remedy. Access to courts, lawyers, and effective challenge is already difficult across the Balkans. Geography, language barriers, limited legal aid, and weak institutional capacity make it far harder for people to contest detention or deportation than it would be in a well-resourced domestic system. If the UK were to place people into this environment under a return-hub model, it would be doing so precisely because the setting makes challenge more difficult. That makes legal precarity not an unfortunate by-product but a structural feature of the model.

The result is a system in which people are not only detained, but detached. Detached from meaningful oversight, detached from accessible legal support, and detached from any stable sense of where responsibility lies. This is perhaps the most important consequence of externalisation in the Balkans: it turns harm into something geographically distant and politically ambiguous. Violence becomes easier to deny when it is no longer visible at the point where the decision was made.

That is why Stage 3 is so important to the wider argument. It shows that externalisation does not solve the crisis of migration governance. It reproduces that crisis somewhere else, in places already carrying the weight of border violence. The UK is not exporting a remedy. It is exporting its contradictions, and in doing so it risks deepening detention, pushbacks, arbitrary confinement, and legal limbo across the region.