MAHAD HUSSEIN SALLAMDelegating without resolving: how the major powers are outsourcing their crises

Mahad Hussein Sallam (bio), Mediapart, Aug. 1, 2025
Translated by Tlaxcala

Outsourcing borders, prisons, wars: the major powers are delegating crisis management to authoritarian regimes, private companies, and militias. This strategy removes democracy from debate and accountability, sells off its principles, and comes at a high cost to citizens and the most vulnerable. It is a historic shift toward distant power that shirks its own consequences.

 Faced with major challenges such as migration, security, justice, armed conflict, and foreign policy, the major powers are no longer repairing, they are transferring.

Subcontracting to authoritarian regimes, outsourcing to gray areas, sending people to distant peripheries: everything is decided far from the public eye, far from rights. In the name of technocratic efficiency, states are neglecting the essentials, to the point of jeopardizing the very foundations of democracy. By delegating, they are giving up their right to govern. By shirking responsibility, they are undermining the democratic contract.

This text questions a global strategy of political abandonment, where outsourcing and transfer become a mode of governance. A mode of denial.

Emergency governments and the neglect of politics

For more than a decade, a watchword has prevailed in the management of major contemporary crises, such as migration, security, justice, and war: delegate rather than resolve.

Faced with the rapid pace of history, states, particularly in Europe but also elsewhere in the global North, are adopting a reflex that has become doctrine: outsourcing. Transfer the burden, outsource responsibility, relocate the consequences. Rather than tackling the root causes—conflicts, structural inequalities, climate change, postcolonial divide—the powers that be prefer to entrust the management of chaos to others: often authoritarian third countries, dictatorships, private companies with no democratic mandate, local militias, agencies far removed from citizen control.

This emergency governance, disguised as pragmatism, frees itself from politics. It sidesteps debate, circumvents popular sovereignty, and trivializes a form of management by delegation that empties institutions of their meaning.

Presented as an “effective” solution, this strategy is above all a way of avoiding responsibility. And, implicitly, a silent dismantling of the democratic project. Behind this strategy lies a slow, invisible but very real disintegration of our democratic ideal.

What becomes of a democracy when it outsources the exercise of its sovereignty?

This is the central question, the one that is uncomfortable but must be asked: what remains of a democracy when it delegates the very exercise of its sovereignty?

When decision-making, coercion, and control no longer belong to the public sphere but to external actors who are often unknown, opaque, and unelected, what is the value of the principle of government by and for the people?

This text explores three areas where this disarticulation of democratic power has become systemic:

•    migration management, transformed into an outsourced logistical operation, often subcontracted to authoritarian regimes or private structures with no political mandate;

•        criminal justice and prisons, increasingly delegated to commercial operators or emergency territories where the rule of law is absent;

•    security and armed conflict, where the privatization of sovereign functions and their delegation to non-state actors create zones of political unaccountability.

Each time, the symptoms are the same: growing opacity, documented but unpunished abuses, structural inefficiency, and above all a radical break with the very meaning of political action.

Behind the façade of technocratic efficiency, sovereignty emptied of its democratic content is taking hold.

Sovereignty without people, without debate, without control

Migration: externalizing borders, making exile invisible, and denying the very foundations of human rights.

The 2016 EU-Turkey agreement: the matrix of European cynicism

March 2016. To muted applause in Brussels, the European Union seals a pact with Ankara. The stated objective: “to stem the flow of migrants.”. The real objective: to deter, repel, and make invisible.

In exchange for €6 billion, promises on visas, and a vague hope of reviving accession negotiations, Turkey agreed to take back all “irregular” migrants arriving on Greek shores. Donald Tusk, then President of the European Council, saw this as a “fair and balanced” compromise.

The reality is quite different: a fool's bargain, in which Europe trades its demand for rights for the outsourcing of its humanity. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan quickly turned the agreement into a tool for blackmail, threatening to “open the floodgates” to force Brussels to bow to his geopolitical interests.

Behind the hushed language of diplomacy, a rupture has taken place: the outsourcing of migration crisis management is becoming the norm, sovereignty is becoming a transaction, dignity is becoming an adjustment variable. Far from being an isolated case, this pact is becoming a replicable model of deliberate renunciation.

A systemic strategy: migration deals with autocrats

Libya: more than €700 million paid between 2017 and 2023 to coast guards accused of violence, racketeering, and slavery. Exiles intercepted in the Mediterranean Sea are sent back to detention camps denounced as “lawless zones” by the UN.

Tunisia: barely signed in 2023, a memorandum of understanding with Kaïs Saïed (€105 million to “prevent departures”) has led to sub-Saharan migrants being abandoned in the desert, on the brink of death.

Egypt: In March 2024, Brussels commits €7.4 billion to Abdel Fattah al-Sissi's regime. Officially for “stability.” Unofficially to buy an end to departures. All this while tens of thousands of political prisoners languish in Cairo's prisons.

Sudan: without any official agreement, European funds are being channeled through NGOs to areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, led by Hemedti, who is accused of crimes against humanity.

This is no longer a policy, it is a globalized system of delegating inhospitability. A migration diplomacy built on rights violations, with checks and complicit silence.

Rwanda: a laboratory for outsourced asylum

There, far from European eyes, a new milestone has been reached. The United Kingdom and Denmark have signed a partnership agreement with Paul Kagame's regime: rejected asylum seekers will be sent to Kigali, a country where the press is muzzled, the opposition silenced, and there are no countervailing powers.

Officially, it is a stable country. Unofficially, it is an authoritarian state transformed into a deportation hub.

“Asylum is no longer a right. It is a geopolitical adjustment variable,” warns Amnesty International.

Delegating hospitality: ethics turned on its head

The mechanism is now well-oiled: pay to avoid taking people in, cooperate to better offload them, negotiate at the cost of human lives.

 The moral cost is invisible but profound:

• The root causes of migration—conflict, global warming, structural poverty—are neither resolved nor contained. Worse, they are often exacerbated by the very policies of the powers that claim to be fighting them. And the height of cynicism is that refugees who have fled repression, war, or the absence of the rule of law find themselves handed over to the very regimes they left behind, due to a lack of democracy, freedom, and protection.

•    Exiles are turned into commodities, objects to be bartered between chancelleries.

•        European societies are sinking into denial, lulling themselves into a fantasy of control while the far right thrives on this mechanism of rejection.

Outsourcing borders means refusing to look at what we are producing: lives destroyed, rights trampled, democracy in decline. It means shifting exile elsewhere so that we can better forget what it says about us.

Justice and repression: prison as an outsourced service

Prisons abroad: when Europe outsources its convicts

What states refuse to take responsibility for on their own soil, they export. This is the new frontier of contemporary punishment: outsourcing imprisonment.

Norway, 2015. The government rents 242 places in the Dutch prison of Veenhuizen. Norwegian law is supposed to apply there, but the staff are Dutch, as are the walls. Justice becomes a service, adjusted by contract.

Denmark, 2021. This is a step further: €210 million to transfer 300 convicted migrants to a prison in Kosovo. The deal is clear: rid the country of these “unwanted” prisoners.

 Sweden, 2025. The government announces plans to outsource part of its prison system to other European countries.

Belgium, already a pioneer between 2010 and 2016, spent €300 million to rent 650 cells in the Netherlands. A “partnership” in appearance, punitive outsourcing in reality.

Behind these figures lies a managerial logic of punishment. Imprisonment is becoming a budgetary adjustment variable, an accounting item that can be exported at will. Prison is no longer a place of rehabilitation or justice, but a human warehouse with a changeable geography.

Outsourcing punishment: a double social penalty

The human cost is ignored:

•    Removal = isolation. Prisoners sent abroad are deprived of their family ties and all social roots.

•    Reintegration compromised. How can you rebuild your life from a cell hundreds of miles from home, in another country, sometimes in another language?

•    Permanent legal uncertainty. Between two legal systems, prisoners' rights become uncertain, contestable, invisible.

In this system, prison sentences cease to be an act of justice. They become a logistical service, outsourced and trivialized. The convicted person becomes an object circulating in a deregulated penal space.

Readmission agreements: exclusion under contract

But prison outsourcing is only the tip of the iceberg. At a deeper level, states are organizing another form of punitive delegation: readmission agreements.

A telling example is Switzerland and Swaziland (now Eswatini). An agreement allows Bern to return people deemed “undesirable” to Swaziland, even if they are neither from nor have ties to that country.

In practice, this means deportations without a solid legal basis to a regime classified as authoritarian by Freedom House.

Here, “cooperation” is just a word to mask the abandonment of the law. We no longer judge, we transfer. We no longer protect, we expel.

Outsourcing justice means abandoning our humanity. It means treating prison sentences as a cost rather than a political act.

Above all, it means renouncing the democratic promise of fair, public, and controlled justice. When the state punishes from a distance, it abdicates its responsibility. And citizens become a line item in the budget.

War: proxy conflicts, outsourced violence

•    With the blessing of the United States, on the night of March 25-26, 2015, Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm in Yemen, with the support of a Sunni Arab coalition, in what was already shaping up to be a proxy war. Behind the scenes, Mohamed Ben Zayed, humiliated by Iran's confiscation of three islands, reportedly declared: “We will confront the Iranians in Yemen,”  thus delivering an entire country to the logic of a regional confrontation disguised as stabilization.

•    In Ukraine, European states and the United States  are supplying weapons without taking responsibility for post-conflict management.

•    In the Sahel, French forces are withdrawing, leaving the field open to private militias or Wagner.

•    In Syria, gray areas of control are multiplying, with no clear mandate.

Who is responsible for the crimes? Who is watching? Who decides? No one.

What this delegation is doing to our societies

• Democratic fatigue: decisions are taken without public debate.

• Fragmentation: insecurity, polarization, radicalization.

• Loss of meaning: what is the point of democracy if it no longer protects us?

Democracies on subcontract: the end of a model?

We thought we had contained the crisis. In reality, we have exported it.

We have built a policy of avoidance: short-term, technocratic, depoliticized. A model where problems are transferred far away, where silence is bought, where agreements are signed with authoritarian regimes to “manage” what we no longer want to see: migration, wars, prisons, lives.

Behind every agreement, every deportation, every outsourced base, there is a renunciation:

• Renunciation of our democratic principles.

• Renunciation of transparency and debate.

• Renouncing the universal values we claim to embody.

But this cynicism comes at a price. A colossal price, which the peoples themselves are paying, and will continue to pay.

Billions of euros are being spent on outsourcing crisis management, while in our cities, our countryside, and our neighbourhoods, public services are falling apart, precariousness is on the rise, and inequalities are exploding.

Politicians have their eyes only fixed on the next election. Even the opposition now seems trapped in a logic of political marketing, cut off from the real concerns of citizens. Visions for society seem to be a distant memory.

Democracy is becoming an empty shell, a slogan without substance.

What we have outsourced is not just crisis management.

It is political responsibility itself.

So let's ask the real questions:

Are we at a turning point in our history?

Have we given up on governing so that we no longer have to choose?

And what remains of a democracy when it refuses to face up to what it produces?

Any crisis we refuse to face here, that we transfer, make invisible, or outsource, always comes back. But this time, not as a fact to be managed, but as a wounded memory, turned against us, against our principles, against our society itself.