What possible roles can universities play in supporting human rights defenders (HRDs) who have been forcibly displaced? What different forms can this support take? What institutional and legal frameworks enable or constrain universities in providing broader and more sustainable support to displaced HRDs? And what differences can we identify between the Global North and the Global South in the support provided by universities? In a new working paper comparing universities in Germany, the Czech Republic and Thailand which are supporting exiled HRDs from Russia and Myanmar respectively, May Thida Aung and Alexander Kalgin argue that the less formal model may hold lessons for the more formal one.
Authoritarianism is spreading globally, and so is the reality of exile for many HRDs. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the political repressions that followed have driven an estimated 800,000 people out of Russia in a single year. The 2021 military coup in Myanmar sent thousands across the border into Thailand. Among both of these mass displacements are many HRDs: environmentalists, feminist and LGBTQ+ activists, lawyers and journalists.
There are “protection infrastructures” available to help displaced activists. These are legal frameworks that allow activists to continue their advocacy abroad. However, they are fragmented. One is asylum, a broader protection mechanism for people forced to leave their countries and unable to return home safely. Another protection infrastructure – “temporary relocation schemes”- offers respite for HRDs, but usually for a short period of time and assumes that the activist can return home, which is often not the case. Neither is designed to sustain activism over the long term. What can universities do in this context?
Four concepts for thinking about university support
In our working paper, we review legislation, policy documents, NGO reports and university programmes in three host countries. Germany and the Czech Republic host many Russian exiles; Thailand hosts many HRDs from Myanmar. To make sense of what universities do, we use two pairs of concepts.
The first pair identifies trends in how universities see activists. Under a humanitarian model, an activist is seen as a vulnerable person in need of refuge and money. Under a solidarity model, the activist is seen as a knowledge producer whose experience can contribute to research and teaching.
The second pair of concepts concerns what universities do. As stabilisers they provide the minimum for survival: student status, a visa, housing, perhaps a stipend. Enrolment becomes a way to secure legal residence, and the activism is “activists' own problem”. As enablers, universities may go further: they offer platforms, networks, events, and research partnerships that support activists and allow those who seek it to integrate into academia or other forms of activism. These are ideal types. In practice, a single university can act as a stabiliser in one situation and as an enabler in another.
Germany and Czechia: strong frameworks, mostly stabilisers
Germany is a state party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, meaning an asylum mechanism exists that is theoretically accessible to Russian refugees. In addition, Germany introduced the “humanitarian visas” pathway to accommodate people at high risk of persecution. Between 2022 and 2025, around 2,500 Russians received humanitarian visas before the programme was suspended in 2025 amid a right-wing political shift following the 2025 parliamentary elections.
Though also a state party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the Czech Republic restricted entry much earlier: visas for Russians were suspended in 2022, a Civil Society Program designed to allow entry to politically persecuted migrants was introduced; however, it was limited to 500 annual places and admitted only about 170 people in its first year, and in 2025 citizenship applications were frozen.
Within these frameworks, universities act mainly as stabilisers. Enrolment gives activists legal status and the freedom to move (as in Germany, this right is restricted under humanitarian visa regulations). Some programmes do act as enablers, such as arrangements to host Russian scholar-activists at several universities both in Germany and the Czech Republic. But they are exceptions, and support is offered to people as scholars rather than as activists.
In the discourse around university assistance to activists, the concept of academic neutrality is often used to justify universities' lack of engagement with activists. Some administrators and stakeholders see academic neutrality as a legal norm that prevents universities from supporting activists. University administrators may be apprehensive about openly supporting activists, fearing it will attract unwanted attention from influential critics of university freedoms and endanger sources of university funding.
Thailand: weak protection, more room to enable
Thailand has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention. Its National Screening Mechanism which allows at-risk people to stay in Thailand approved just 7 of 200 applications from different countries in 2025. Many Myanmar activists live undocumented, or regularise themselves as low-skilled workers through the “pink card” scheme.
Yet Thai universities do more than we expected. Mahidol University’s Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies offers more than 20 scholarships a year to students from Myanmar. Chiang Mai University’s Regional Center for Social Science and Development (RCSD) runs a Myanmar Research Fellow Program that treats exiled scholars and activists as partners in producing knowledge. Universities help with visas and host conferences that bring scholars and activists together. Here, stabilising and enabling, humanitarianism and solidarity, sit side by side.
These three cases point to a surprising finding: an inverse relationship between the formalisation of legal protection and the creativity actors deploy within universities. In Thailand's less regulated environment, universities have found more flexible, solidarity-based ways to sustain activism than in the highly formalised contexts of Germany and Czechia.
A question for the future
Our study is based on desk research, and its findings should therefore be understood as indicative. At the same time, the working paper points to a broader question that deserves further attention: what might formal protection systems in the Global North learn from the more informal, flexible, and often locally embedded practices that have emerged in the Global South to support HRDs? Rather than assuming that approaches developed in one context can simply be transferred to another, this question invites us to explore how different institutional, legal, and social arrangements shape possibilities for protection. It also suggests that practices developed outside formal protection rules may offer valuable insights into how these measures could become more responsive, accessible, and sustainable. Further research could therefore examine not only what forms of protection exist, but also how different approaches might inform and complement one another across contexts. We invite you to read the full working paper, From Stabilisers to Enablers? The Role of Universities in Supporting Russian and Myanmar Human Rights Defenders in Exile in Germany, Czechia, and Thailand, published as Working Paper No. 10 by the UNESCO Chair in Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Expansion of Political Space, Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York.
This research was made possible thanks to a grant from the Gerda Henkel Foundation
About the authors
May Thida Aung is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York. She researches human rights education, the protection of displaced human rights defenders, environmental rights and academic freedom.
Alexander Kalgin is a qualitative sociologist and visiting researcher at the Center for Reconciliation Studies, University of Bonn. He studies the sociology of academia and forced migration.