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This article aims to contribute to a political sociology of the crisis management instruments developed within the European Commission in the 2000s. The analysis of bureaucratic transactions within the European institutional space highlights the dynamic behind the creation of these instruments, which have enabled the Commission to carve out an autonomous space of intervention with respect to armed conflicts. In turn, taking into account the social and professional structure of the spaces in which these instruments were designed from their creation to their use in a crisis situation – that of Burundi – sheds additional light on the effects of the “instrumentation” of crisis management. The hypothesis of the “weak field” is used to trace certain dynamics of the deployment of “governance through delegation” (Boussaguet, Jacquot, 2009) introduced by these instruments, which rely on NGOs for their implementation. On the one hand, this is a question of mutual accommodation between the European Commission and NGOs in the structuring of a professional market for crisis management in Brussels. On the other hand, this governance is also embedded in a reciprocal and continuous relationship between Brussels and the space of intervention, in Burundi, which since the 1990s has played an instrumental role as a laboratory in the shift of international development policies towards the management of violent conflict.