For most of history, to flee one’s country was to detach oneself from its politics. Exiles might have attempted to smuggle books, pamphlets, money or weapons back home, but could do little to shape events there directly. Autocratic regimes knew as much, which is why some expelled dissidents rather than imprison them (“That’s it! Everything is over! Life is over,” cried Wolf Biermann, a regime-critical East German singer, on hearing while on tour in West Germany in 1976 that he would not be allowed back). Exile, that “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place”, as Edward Said put it, generally meant powerlessness and silence.
But in the past decade or so Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Telegram have transformed all that. “Digital technologies enable activists and journalists to participate in their country’s civic life from afar, almost in real time,” observes a report published in February by Freedom House, an American NGO. “More than ever before, people forced to flee abroad can engage in public debates through social media, run media outlets, campaign for human rights, and support dissident movements in the origin country.”
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