JX Fund – European Fund for Journalism in Exile

The 15th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC) will be held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from October 19 – 23, 2027, and is being co-hosted by GIJN and De Vereniging van Onderzoeksjournalisten (VVOJ) — the Dutch-Flemish Association of Investigative Journalists — which has played an outsized role in promoting quality investigative reporting in the region and across Europe since its founding in 2002.

Alfred Friendly Press Partners, which has trained over 400 journalists from 90 countries for over 40 years, is now accepting applications for its 2026 program. The fellowship is a four-week in-person program focused on foreign journalists who are living in exile in the US. The program builds skills and resiliency in these areas: Security, Legal, Journalism and Entrepreneurship.

Twenty years after the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, Russian independent journalism survives only in exile, with a new generation citing her courage as their guiding principle against state repression. For many opponents of the current regime, her murder marked a definitive turning point in Russia’s post-Soviet trajectory, signaling the end of pluralism and the beginning of an irreversible slide into authoritarianism.

RSF brought together EU institutions and exiled journalists to discuss countering Kremlin propaganda through the Svoboda satellite package. The initiative reaches millions of households in Russia and Belarus, helping exiled outlets bypass internet censorship and reconnect with audiences at home. The event also highlighted the need for continued support for exiled media.

Independent Russian media in exile play a crucial role in providing audiences inside Russia with alternative information about the war and its consequences. CEPA argues that Western governments should treat these outlets as a strategic capability, supporting their access to audiences, credibility and digital infrastructure rather than undermining their efforts to challenge the Kremlin’s monopoly over information.

Five years after the Taliban’s takeover, research organizations and countless other Afghan-led networks persist—training scholars, running underground classrooms, providing legal aid by phone. With NED support, over a thousand partners were evacuated to safety. Despite erasure from public life, Afghan women and civic leaders continue building the foundations for their country’s future.

Coffee in the morning, fear by afternoon: an Afghan journalist works undercover for an exiled media outlet, dreading every knock at the gate. After interviewing a woman with a disability about domestic violence, she halts publication — fearing surveillance cameras could expose her identity.

Since Russia’s crackdown drove over 2,000 journalists into exile, more than 90 outlets now depend on YouTube, Telegram and other Big Tech platforms to reach audiences. This research examines how opaque AI algorithms shape their visibility—and how exiled media, in turn, try to exploit those same algorithmic biases to survive.

A new report from Cloudflare, a company that provides cybersecurity services to internet providers, highlights the array of digital transnational repression tactics employed against exile media outlets and journalists. The report finds that around 5 percent of the 41 billion requests directed to exile journalism websites between February 2025 and January 2026 were harmful and sought to disrupt the outlets’ connections to their readers.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 challenged much of the common Western understanding of Russia. How can the world better understand Russia? What are the steps forward for Western policy? The Eurasia Center’s “Russia Tomorrow” series seeks to reevaluate conceptions of Russia today and better prepare for its future tomorrow.

Russia’s parliament unanimously passed a law targeting exiled critics, including “foreign agents,” with frozen bank accounts, revoked driving licenses, and denied consular services like passport renewal. RSF warns the Kremlin is extending repression beyond its borders to silence independent journalism abroad.

Clare Cook and David Lush explore how exiled media managers keep organisations running through repeated forced relocations. Drawing on workshops and interviews with exiled media leaders, they map five stages of instability and apply mixed embeddedness theory to show how support for exiled media can be strengthened.

Since Russians invasian in 2022 many journalists emigrated to keep independently reporting about the war to Russians, many outlets have launched English-language versions of their publications in order to find new revenue streams to support their work, as the Russian authorities have introduced increasingly restrictive legal measures targeting support for independent media.

Amu TV was born out of the collapse of Afghanistan’s media landscape, and is one of the most influential exiled media outlets serving Afghanistan today. By broadcasting via satellite from the US, the channel has bypassed Taliban censorship and reached millions of viewers inside the country, offering a rare space for uncensored news, political debate, entertainment, and more.

In a series of workshops, exiled journalists now living in the UK told how all faced significant barriers to continuing their careers. Many struggled to gain a foothold in the UK media industry, so the Rory Peck Trust is partnering with City St George’s, University of London, to enable one journalist-in-exile to complete an M.A. in International Journalism.

China and Russia, principally, test the limits of this new period of autocratic impunity—not just in the abstract but in ways that fundamentally impact citizens, businesses, democratic institutions, and the practice of basic freedoms in every region. This essay series analyzes how these emerging patterns will create new vulnerabilities for democracy actors.

What do Saudi journalist Turki al-Jasser, Philippine journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan have in common? All were prosecuted in the name of “national security” between 2020 and 2026. They are far from isolated cases. From Gaza to Hong Kong to Managua, 100s of journalists are being targeted for providing citizens with reliable news.