Relocated Civic Actors: Time for a Comprehensive Support Framework

Authoritarianism and repression of democratic civil society are spreading around the world, driving a growing number of civic actors to leave their country. This area of democracy support will only become more important: it needs more systematic attention. 

 

A key feature of contemporary attacks on civil society is that regimes are driving civic actors out of their countries and seeking to stop them from maintaining influence from abroad. Against this backdrop, the transnational dimension of pro-democracy activism is more important than ever. Yet, relocated civic actors say the support they currently receive is insufficient, inadequate, and concentrated among small circles of well-known individuals and organisations disconnected from grassroots activism.

This paper explores the key features of relocated civic actors, their activities, and the operating environment they face. It then offers ideas about how European and other international democracy supporters can better support this growing contingent of an increasingly hounded global civil society.

Relocation Scale and Triggers

The last decade has shown the global nature and diversity of the flight of civic actors. It is extremely difficult to establish even a broad estimate of the number of people involved, but the following examples give an idea of the scale of movement.

• In Africa, thousands of civic actors from Rwanda and Sudan have fled to countries including Chad, Egypt, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda as well as further afield to Belgium, Canada, France, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
• In Asia, thousands have left mainland China, Hong Kong, and Myanmar for the likes of Australia, Canada, Germany, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. People fleeing Myanmar have also headed to India, Malaysia, and Thailand.
• In Europe, thousands have fled Belarus and Russia for destinations such as France, Georgia, Germany, Lithuania, and Poland.
• In Latin America, thousands have left Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, principally for Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, and the United States.
• In the Middle East, thousands have fled Egypt and Syria for the likes of Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, and Turkey as well as France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Gathering data on how and when civic activists left a particular country is difficult because of the challenge of isolating them within general immigration, or even within refugee or asylum data. It is even harder to identify cases in which the repressive environment was a person’s sole or main reason for leaving. What is more, the introduction of laws and administrative measures to repress civil society does not provide enough indicators by which to track outflows of people over time.

What evidence there is strongly suggests that civic actors stay in their country for as long as possible, even as the environment becomes more repressive. Beyond personal circumstances, they do so out of commitment to their cause and awareness that leaving will usually diminish their credibility with their audiences. As the situation deteriorates, there is also sometimes a tendency to hope for the best rather than prepare for the worst – including for leaving. It appears that civic actors are driven out not by one or more acts of repression but by increasing threats to their safety or that of their families. In many cases, the decision to leave is based on their personal financial situation becoming vulnerable, which can be due to economic conditions in the country and their inability to keep or find a job or practise their profession because they have been victimised. In some cases, the eruption of violent conflict is also a trigger for leaving.

Activism in Relocation

Among the civic actors that have relocated in the last decade, prominent figures and civil society organisations (CSOs) draw the most attention, but most operate at the lightly institutionalised or grassroots level.

Embracing Digital Technology

A comprehensive transition to digital technology is crucial for newly relocated civic actors. It would be almost impossible for them to continue their activism without sophisticated digital approaches to connecting with their home country, advocating and raising awareness, and maintaining a sense of community. New technologies increasingly enable transnational civic activism. Relocated actors are now able to promote democratic change and collaborate with their peers in their home country – whether the latter operate openly or clandestinely – through tools such as encrypted communications and cryptocurrency as well as open platforms like social media.

Supporting In-Country Activists

Relocated actors continue to support activists on the ground in their home country, from providing material or financial assistance to assisting with decentralised activism when mass mobilisation is too dangerous. They also provide critical infrastructure to in-country activists, helping them to stay connected and networked while mitigating the risks of direct in-country communication.

Influencing and Amplifying

Today, news and social media tools and platforms allow relocated civic actors to contribute without time lags to their home country’s political life. By disseminating information, ideas, and advice, they provide political “remittances” and intellectual “ammunition”. Within public opinion in their home country, they often act as influencers. They can be simultaneously originators and amplifiers of information, as when exiled media like the Berlin-based Azerbaijani Meydan TV use reporters in their home country and transmit their information back into it. This can make them “facilitators of oppositions”.

Supporting New Arrivals

Increasingly, relocated civic actors provide information and assistance to those who want to leave, or have recently left, their home country, enabling them to resettle quickly and continue their activism without delay. Their help for new arrivals includes psychosocial support, safety and security training, local and transnational outreach and advocacy, and help for new initiatives. In some cases, they have established structures, such as the Belarusian Solidarity Center in Warsaw, that offer a landing strip for relocators.

Influencing New Audiences

Relocated civic actors increasingly lobby governments for easier visa and residence paths for activists, alongside putting diplomatic pressure on home regimes. The likes of the Mexico-based Cuban organisation Justicia 11J document and spread awareness about repression in their home country and amplify the voices of activists still there. Such groups sometimes collaborate with host-country CSOs on campaigns or crowdfunding. Relocation also gives activists new opportunities to build connections with donors. For some, like the US-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, it results in a more vocal stance against the home-country regime and a greater focus on influencing international policymakers to act, such as by issuing sanctions.

Diversifying Methods and Skills

By increasing work avenues and incentivising experimentation, relocation – especially in its early stages – can diversify the focus and methods of activism. For example, in recent years, many relocated actors have taken on media and advocacy roles alongside or instead of their pre-relocation activities.

Their new location also gives them opportunities to develop new skills. Journalists and media organisations in exile are highly innovative, making the most of digital opportunities to develop new practices, produce new kinds of content, and target new and wider audiences. The Prague-based Russian outlet Verstka is one example.

Relocated actors are often at the forefront of technological innovation to improve operational security and circumvent censorship as well as collaborating through hubs and co-working initiatives, like the Exile Media Hub Brandenburg in Germany.

Enabling Factors and Obstacles

Most of the civic actors that have relocated in recent years have, to varying extents, benefited from the same enabling factors and faced the same obstacles. The combination of these determines their ability to survive and have an impact.

Host-country conditions. Relocation to rich, democratic host countries and the presence there of earlier, strong diaspora organisations are key enablers. Understanding and support from the host-country authorities are also needed.

Safety and security. The availability of secure communication channels and the ability to constantly update safety measures are further essential enablers of successful relocation.

Flexibility and creativity. Flexibility and creativity are fundamental elements of success. CIVICUS argues that operating in networks with a movement mindset is now essential to civil society, and that many relocated actors are adept at core aspects of this: distributed leadership, nimble decision-making, a focus on shared values, and a willingness to listen.

Psychosocial struggles. Displacement, especially under the circumstances that often drive activists to leave, can be traumatic. Many relocate to expensive cities – like western capitals – to continue their activism, which causes financial stress. These factors, combined with uncertainty about their residence status and loss of their social and/or professional status, create psychological stress that can limit their ability to continue their work.

Legal and bureaucratic hurdles. Recently relocated civic actors face several challenges beyond legal entry, from regularising their residence and employment status to accessing state and private services to fulfilling legal and administrative requirements before they can continue their work – for example, registering a new CSO and obtaining the permission to raise, receive, and disburse funds. These challenges are greater for activists who have fled regions that are subject to restrictive host-country migration policies, such as those who have left Africa or the Middle East and relocated in Europe.

Lack of access to banking services, including pre-emptively before relocation, is particularly hampering: civic actors are usually limited to using the services of non-traditional fintech companies, with risks including potential exposure to home-country authorities, should these companies later seek to operate there.

Competition for funding. Relocation risks replicating or worsening an issue that civic actors faced in their home country: a few trusted CSOs receiving the majority of donor support. Relocated actors also report that as relocation increases, and especially if there is a new wave from a large country, competition for funding increases, as does the likelihood of smaller or less prominent communities losing out.

Losing connection. Relocated civic actors navigate major obstacles to continue working with their peers and partners in their home country. In the most repressive environments, continuing to reach them – and wider audiences – requires a constant intensive effort to fight back against administrative, security, and technological measures; censorship and restrictions on internet freedom; and hostile penetration of online platforms. As a result, civic actors struggle to sustain their networks and contacts, and must constantly consider whether their methods will endanger these contacts. Over time, they also risk losing awareness of the situation on the ground, including the everyday realities for local activists.

Digital downsides. Heavy reliance on digital tools among relocated civic actors, and between them and their home country, has downsides.

First, the impact of these tools depends on the digital landscape of the home country being somewhat equivalent to that of the host country, as well as on the capacity of local civic actors to use activity in the digital sphere to build activity on the ground.

Second, relocated actors sometimes have to use risky communication platforms because these are the dominant ones in their home country – for example, Telegram in Russia and WeChat in China. (I am grateful to Nate Schenkkan for this point.) Given that transnational repression is increasing, this may increase the security risks – online and offline – facing activists and their families: risks compounded by host governments’ limited understanding of, and responses to, such repression.

Third, if relocated actors increasingly form communities of communication, there is a risk that communication becomes almost the sum total of community. This has negative consequences for different forms of activism: as CIVICUS points out, while technology enables connections, civil society networks cannot rely on it alone.

Generational divides. Recently relocated actors often join communities made up of more than one wave or generation of others who have relocated – each of which may have done so for different reasons, have different levels of politicisation, and hold diverging views about their home country and return. In some cases, this diversity is mapped out over different host locations. This divergence can create problems of intergenerational understanding and divides over methods and goals. For example, younger activists are often said to be more open to collaboration with peers from other countries and more reluctant to work with governments and international organisations.

How Can Europe Better Support Relocated Civic Actors?

Democracy-supporting governments and institutions in Europe try to assist relocated civic actors. Their usual focus on prominent individuals and CSOs is understandable: it is difficult to develop a detailed understanding of large-scale relocation from several repressive environments to several host countries.

However, in many instances, the focus is on assisting with exit and resettlement, which, while crucial, should be understood as only the first stage of the support required. Democracy supporters also need to better understand how the time since activists relocated shapes the continuity and impact of their activism. The initial period is highly disruptive and time consuming, limiting activists’ opportunities and resources for continuing their work. Then, over time, there is a growing risk of deterioration in home-country connections or of demotivation. A crucial question, therefore, is whether there is an optimal time window for most productively supporting relocated actors after the exit and relocation phase, and what types of assistance are crucial at each stage.

Support for relocated actors to continue their activism can be framed as protective (securing their position and operations in the host country), enabling (helping them to keep reaching their home country), or precautionary (helping them prepare for the contingency of relocation). The increasing repression of civic space worldwide means that more activists are likely to flee repressive contexts. There is thus a clear need for a European and global framework with longer-term support strategies. Below are four pillars of such a framework.

Comprehensive Contingency Planning and Preparations

The precautionary aspect of support can seem controversial because European democracy-support actors do not want to discourage activists from carrying on working in their home country. However, relocation often becomes unavoidable. What is more, democracy supporters are not immune to the institutional tendency to downplay worst-case scenarios for fear of fuelling defeatism – and, as noted, civic actors sometimes hope for the best instead of preparing for the worst. On both sides, there is a risk of leaving contingency planning until very late, with negative consequences for relocated actors’ ability to keep operating with limited disruption.

European democracy supporters must plan and prepare more systematically for more relocations, including as part of early-warning systems about civil society restrictions. Some already provide their partners in repressive environments with training and advice on leaving, but a more comprehensive approach to contingency planning is needed. Given the legal and administrative obstacles involved in relocation, this planning should be done with civic actors that, for the most part, are small organisations or individuals and cannot easily do it on their own. Enabling exchanges of experiences and knowledge with earlier relocators from different countries would be useful; this could include informal, low-cost, moderated efforts on existing online platforms.

A Distinct and Streamlined Pathway Within Migration Policy

While activism is becoming increasingly mobile, people’s ability to move across borders is being restricted in Europe and elsewhere. In the face of this paradox, it is politically unrealistic to expect European governments to welcome a mass flight of people, including activists, from repressive environments, even in major crises. Instead, governments should consider providing clearly identified civic actors fleeing potential harm with targeted, streamlined pathways to entry and residence that are more distinct than current refugee/asylum and humanitarian strands in migration policy.

This is difficult to address for democracy-support officials who are mostly in aid, diplomatic, or human rights roles. The administrative costs of implementing such a system at scale would pose a major challenge as it would require identification, triage, and sometimes security screening. A system for separating civic activists from the administration of asylum, humanitarian, and economic migration would also be a difficult political sell in countries where immigration debates lean towards restriction and democracy support is being deprioritised. Advocacy for such a system could stress that it would involve a small number of people who need to leave their country to keep working there and who are committed to returning there at the earliest opportunity.

In the short term, European countries should at least take a broad view of the use of humanitarian visas for civic actors from repressive environments, rather than restrict their use. In this context, as one Russian activist put it, “a humanitarian visa is not only a humanitarian action, it is also a strategic foreign policy one”.

A Dedicated Financial Instrument for Supporting Transnational Activism

When it comes to developing a broader framework for supporting relocated civic actors, recent efforts in Canada to flesh one out provide a good overview. They highlight the need to create an enabling environment and some ways to do so. Measures could include providing relocated civic actors with legal assistance with immigration and residence processes; delivering capacity-building programmes that give them the resources, tools, and skills to continue their activism and develop organisational resilience; and connecting activists with host-country communities. Support for relocated civic actors should place a particular emphasis on skills and secure tools for online campaigning, collaboration, network building, and peer-support groups.

The European Union (EU), European governments, and nongovernmental organisations should, collectively or individually, establish a dedicated financial instrument for supporting relocated civic actors’ transnational activism, given that funding for this work comes largely from country-specific (and sometimes region-specific) foreign-assistance budgets. One example was the multi-donor and -implementer Lifeline: Embattled Civil Society Organizations Assistance Fund that shut down recently. This model could be replicated by an initial group of donors and implementers that have shown interest in support for long-term relocated actors. This could be applied in a “friends of relocation” approach if there is resistance to, or a delay in, setting up an instrument within the EU institutions.

In addition, European donors should do more to support the many relocated civic actors based close to their home country, including through diplomatic messaging about their treatment with host governments that, in many cases, are more authoritarian than democratic. This would have the added political advantage of reducing the likelihood of follow-on relocations from such host countries to European ones. European philanthropic institutions, given their greater flexibility of focus, could also fund the creation of networks of relocated actors from different countries.

Greater Protection Against Transnational Repression

The EU and European governments need to adopt a stronger stance for protecting relocated civic actors from transnational repression, including by following the recommendations of international civil society, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the G7. Canada and the United Kingdom have been at the forefront of recognising and taking steps to address transnational repression, even if implementation has sometimes been slow. In 2025, the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on Chinese and Thai officials for acts of transnational repression.

A more protective approach must include stronger identification of, and warnings about, actors from repressive states operating in host countries, as well as personal safety measures for activists at risk. It must also include more engagement with not only relocated civic actors but also wider diasporas. The digital security of relocated civic actors – accounting for their specific needs – should be included in any policy to defend against hostile foreign actors’ threats to domestic political and civic actors, as there is considerable overlap between such threats and transnational repression.

European governments need to provide relocated civic actors with legal protections against repressive regimes’ abuses of domestic and international law. Law enforcement, national security, and migration officials should receive guidance and training about the weaponisation of extradition requests, Interpol notices, and financial-integrity rules against activists, for example. It is also important to address repressive regimes’ attempts to curtail their nationals’ cross-border mobility through measures such as requiring them to return to renew their passport and other forms of identification.

Conclusion

Debates about supporting relocated civic actors are taking place in a context of strong budgetary constraints across Europe and elsewhere and calls for resources to support democracy face strong fiscal and political headwinds. What is more, the dismantling in 2025 of US democracy-support infrastructure, including programmes that helped activists to relocate, has had a catastrophic impact worldwide, with many CSOs facing or succumbing to existential financial threats. This makes the burden much heavier for other international actors. What is more, there is a growing debate within civil society globally as to whether the traditional donor-reliant funding model has reached its limits.

Against this backdrop, this may seem to be an inauspicious moment to advocate elevating a neglected area of democracy support. Yet globally, many indicators of authoritarianism and repression of democratic civil society are flashing red, which strongly suggests that the phenomenon of relocated civic actors will grow. Therefore, the issue cannot be avoided, especially in a moment that calls for rethinking established models of civil society support.

 

This paper was first published as a chapter in New Approaches to Defending Global Civil Society, edited by Richard Youngs and Elene Panchulidze (European Democracy Hub, February 2026). The text has been slightly updated in one place to reflect the fact that the Lifeline: Embattled Civil Society Organizations Assistance Fund shut down since the paper was written.

 

The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.