What happens when the organizations trying to protect people are the very thing that allows governments to abandon them? This is not a hypothetical. It is what we found in Serbia — a country that does not want to keep migrants, where migrants do not want to stay, and where the European Union funds just enough humanitarian infrastructure to ensure that nobody has to answer for what happens in between.
Our work, Compassionate Abandonment: How Humanitarian NGOs Enable State Withdrawal in EU Buffer Zones, co-authored with Gordana Đuretić and currently under review, introduces a concept we call compassionate abandonment to describe a governance arrangement that has become normalized across Europe's migration corridor. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Serbia between 2019 and 2024 — twenty-six in-depth interviews with government officials, law enforcement, civil society workers, and academic researchers, alongside over forty hours of non-participatory observation at reception centers, informal gathering spaces, and border regions — the research exposes a structural trap that implicates everyone and absolves no one.
"Humanitarian organizations paradoxically sustain the very systems of exclusion they seek to ameliorate. And they cannot stop without making things worse."
The Governance Void
Governing People Who Do Not Exist
To understand what is happening in Serbia, it helps to start with a question that political theory has never adequately answered: what rights do people have when they fit none of the categories through which states have traditionally organized political authority?
Since antiquity, political communities have sorted populations into categories defining who belongs, who may stay, and who is passing through. Classical Athens distinguished citizens, resident aliens, and strangers — each with defined rights and obligations flowing both ways. Modern states inherited this logic. Citizens belong. Legal residents stay with defined status. Visitors pass through under regulated conditions.
Transit migration breaks this schema entirely. It produces populations who are free persons present in territory, yet not citizens, not registered residents, and not brief visitors whom hospitality norms will soon release. In Serbia, people remain for months, sometimes years, in a condition we call permanent temporariness — present in the territory but absent from every legal and political category that would trigger state obligations toward them.
The critical finding of our fieldwork is this: states govern these populations anyway. They detain, process, remove, and police them. They leverage their presence for EU funding, cooperation agreements, and political concessions. Force is exercised over persons with whom the state has no defined relationship of authority and obligation. The governance void is a space where power operates without the relational framework — the mutual structure of rights and duties — that would render its exercise legitimate.
How Compassionate Abandonment Works
This is what we mean by compassionate abandonment. It is not a failure of humanitarianism. It is humanitarianism functioning exactly as the system needs it to — absorbing the human costs of policies designed to control populations without protecting them.
Ruling Through Absence
A New Form of Governmental Rationality
Drawing on Foucault's concept of pastoral power, we argue that EU buffer zones represent laboratories for a new type of governmental rationality — one that operates negatively, through absence. States do not rule transit populations through direct administration. They rule through structured withdrawal: by stepping back far enough that humanitarian actors are compelled to step in, and by funding just enough infrastructure to maintain the illusion of governance without accepting the obligations governance normally entails.
This challenges a foundational assumption in both migration studies and humanitarian scholarship — that state power and humanitarianism operate in opposition. Our fieldwork reveals the opposite. Humanitarian actors become governance instruments, managing populations through what we describe as neo-pastoral governance — through care rather than rights, through provision rather than recognition. What began as emergency humanitarian response to the 2015 corridor crisis has calcified into a permanent arrangement. The exception has become the rule.
Populations, meanwhile, become currency. Serbia leverages the presence of transit migrants in EU accession negotiations and funding requests. The EU funds Serbia to manage populations it does not want to reach EU territory. Migrants are traded as political capital between institutions that have no defined obligation toward them.
What the EU Pact Does Not Fix
The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, entering application in June 2026, represents the most comprehensive attempt to administratively manage this void. Its ten legislative instruments establish screening procedures, border mechanisms, solidarity calculations, and crisis protocols. But the Pact elaborates procedures for spaces where the foundational categories of political authority do not obtain. It governs the void by bureaucratizing it — offering procedures where relationship would be required, administration where recognition would be demanded.
The question it does not ask is precisely the question that the existence of the void makes unavoidable: what rights exist where the categories grounding political authority do not apply, and who bears the duty to honor them?
Our fieldwork suggests the answer is currently: nobody. And humanitarian organizations are the mechanism through which that absence of accountability is made sustainable.
Key Concepts
How humanitarian organizations in EU buffer zones paradoxically sustain systems of exclusion by filling protection voids that should trigger state accountability. Their presence creates the appearance of functioning protection while political abandonment intensifies beneath it.
The space produced when populations exist outside the categories through which political authority has traditionally been organized — citizen, resident, visitor. Transit migrants in buffer states like Serbia fit none of these categories, yet states exercise force over them without the relational framework of rights and duties that would make that exercise legitimate.
Drawing on Foucault's concept of pastoral power, this term describes how NGO service delivery manages displaced populations through care rather than rights. Like the pastor who tends the flock, humanitarian organizations provide for populations who have no legal claim to that provision — and whose needs, once met at the humanitarian level, become invisible at the political level.
The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum bureaucratizes the void without resolving it. Meaningful reform requires confronting the foundational question the Pact avoids: what rights exist where established political categories do not apply? Until that question is addressed, humanitarian infrastructure will continue to function as the mechanism through which states outsource their obligations while maintaining the appearance of compliance.
The System That Feeds on Its Own Failures
The Serbia case reveals something that extends far beyond the Balkans. Across every EU buffer zone — Turkey, Morocco, Libya, the Western Balkans — the same architecture is at work: states withdraw, humanitarians fill the gap, the gap becomes permanent, and populations are suspended in a condition that serves everyone's interests except their own.
Humanitarianism and state power do not operate in opposition. They are intertwined components of contemporary border regimes that transform exceptional conditions into normalized governance. The governance void is not an absence of governance — it is governance itself: a form of power that disciplines populations through indefinite suspension rather than explicit exclusion.
The humanitarian actors we interviewed know this. They articulate the trap with painful clarity. And they continue to work — because the alternative is worse.
That is precisely the design.