Introduction

Ever more is being expected from not-for-profits and their directors, trustees and managers. In part, higher anticipated standards of managerial professionalism have resulted from the adoption of market sector practices in the charity sector and changing social norms emphasising greater accountability across all sectors (Anheier and Toepler 2023, 421–22; Productivity Commission 2010, xxx–xxxii; Kurti 2013). This reflects – in many liberal democracies – the adoption of new public management approaches by govern-ment (Anheier, Lang and Toepler 2020, 673–74; Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff 2002, 5) and more sophisticated and strategic approaches to giving on the part of donors (Anheier and Toepler 2023, 200, 213–15; Horvath and Powell 2020, 117; Considine, O’Sullivan and Nguyen 2014, 93–94). These trends have been amplified by the creation of a regulator focused on the not-for-profit sector in Australia in 2012 known as the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC).

Tougher governance requirements serve a purpose: improved systems to measure, report and ensure accountability such that not-for-profit sector assets are used for civil society purposes and not carelessly risked or captured for the enrichment of managers. These heightened governance demands may promote public confidence in the sector in some ways, but they also risk a range of unintended consequences, including disincentivising people from being involved in not-for-profits, whether as volunteers, employees, directors/trustees or as members.

Building on evidence that increased governance expectations may decrease participation, this chapter highlights some of the ways in which increased governance builds false confidence in the sector. That is, reducing participation or changing the form of participation to paid employment has major negative ramifications for the maintenance of social capital (Putnam [2000] 2020; Leigh 2014). Beyond a certain point, there are significant questions about the level of effectiveness of governance and accountability checks and the diversion of scarce resources to undertake those checks (Power 1999), especially if the governance requirements skew activities to game the governance and accountability metrics and divert attention from a not-for-profit's mission (Power 1999; Nel De Koker 2022).2 Importantly, for this chapter, declining participation in the third sector in Australia can also affect the role of not-for-profits as sites of collective action and political expression as well as civic participation more generally.3 This chapter explores the trend towards hyper-regulation of the third sector and the concomitant impact this may have on the vibrancy of engagement and civic participation in Australian democracy.

How to live with contingency? The Greeks elevated Fortuna to the status of a goddess and worshipped her in order to diminish arbitrariness. The Middle Ages managed to separate the contingent from the necessary by creating a solid theological framework. In these times, people could retreat, whenever facing contingency, into a quiet center of necessity guarded by God. Today, too many “necessities,” many of them complex, incomprehensible, not necessary at all, or simply fake, invade our lives. In our consumer-oriented societies, more than in the Middle Ages, we are overwhelmed with so-called “necessities.” These “necessities” are not as fixed and well established as they were in the past but are rather fleeting and impermanent. They are no longer rooted in a lifestyle transmitted from generation to generation following traditional, unchanging structures. In the past, the quietude of a religious center could overlap with the law-bound and purposeful environment of the almost universally rural communities, from which contingency was largely excluded. In modernity, both necessity and contingency are fluid phenomena and less clearly distinguishable.

Contingency is feared more than ever, as the loss of central authority and the multiplication of relationships between individual elements lead to disorientation and anxiety. The conspiratorial mindset “solves” the problem by creating transcendental or imaginary unities. However, it does not establish “real” necessities, nor does it manage to cope with existing contingencies. In the end, unwarranted conspiracy theories lead to even more stress and ressentiment. Similarly, merit-oriented societies treat individuals as though they could be in control of everything, when obviously, way too many things are beyond our control. In this way, meritocracies create new anxieties.

Conspiracy Skepticism

At the same time, the conspiratorial mindset does not have the serenity of Greek Pyrrhonians, who strove to live in a state of eternal suspension of judgment in order to avoid all obligations that could reach them in the form of necessities. Skeptical thought was initiated in Greece by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Xenophanes and Theophrastus; Democritus can be seen as a proto-skeptic, and Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–270 BCE) molded skepticism into a subtle form of psychological philosophy.

Introduction

A key indicator of successful migrant settlement is often identified as participation in civic life, both in formal processes such as voting and lobbying politicians in liberal democracies, and informally in associational engagement and activity. Such engagement is also vital for a sense of national belonging and integration. According to Ager and Strang (2008, 170), civic rights are the foundation on which other settlement outcomes for migrants rest.

This chapter considers the forms of civic engagement, nationally and transnationally, of one of Australia's newest and most visible migrant diaspora communities, those from the African continent. It considers not only participation in Australian democracy but also the importance of civil society groups and transnational political engagements. We argue that civic responsibility, with a transnational orientation, is a feature of this migrant community, demonstrating a positive commitment to formal and informal democratic participation in both the host nation and the country of origin. This broader transnational political connection and commitment demands, we argue, a reconsideration of definitions of the Habermasian ‘public sphere’ as being bounded by the nation-state. However, we acknowledge that these ‘transnational’ connections are just that, enactments of a political (and economic) commitment based on national affiliation to home and host countries, as per Anderson's (1983) classic notion of ‘imagined communities’ which exist within the minds of co-nationals and manifest as ‘long-distance nationalism’ (see also Skrbis 2017). Thus we demonstrate Calhoun's (2007) argument that ‘nations [still] matter’, even for migrant populations. Rather than reporting evidence of cosmopolitan universalism in political engagement, even while personal identities begin to broaden as pan-African, African migrants’ civic commitment is to two nation-states – Australia and their countries of origin.

We begin by considering migrants’ civic engagement generally and in the Australian context and then briefly outline details of the African diaspora in Australia as background. We then make several observations about their civic or political engagement based on preliminary data from exploratory studies. These include consideration of formal citizenship, voting and political participation and other forms of civic engagement and community activity nationally and transnationally, together with questions of pan-African and diasporic local engagement. We conclude with some questions for further research.

One of UNESCO’s primary missions is to raise awareness through dialogue and international collaboration of the threats facing journalists across the world. UNESCO’s annual World Press Freedom Day is a reminder of journalism’s inherent value as a crucial element of democracy and of how freedom of expression is a crucial element of journalism.

The University of Oregon launched the Crossings Institute for Conflict-Sensitive Reporting and Intercultural Dialogue in 2013. A combination of student reporters and faculty, the institute’s members have been participating World Press Freedom Day since to cover the main themes concerning press freedoms globally. The institute’s self-assignment is to raise awareness and stimulate meaningful dialogue for the next generation of journalists.

For UNESCO’s 2024 World Press Freedom Day, student reporters Ruby Wool and I, traveled 6,284 miles from Eugene, Oregon, to Santiago, Chile. On May 3, with our cohort of professors, we attended the inauguration and ceremony, officially launching UNESCO’s theme of the year, a Press for the Planet: Journalism in the Environmental Crisis.

A year before, at World Press Freedom Day events at UN headquarters in New York City, I spoke with Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). A few months later, as detailed by CPJ in its 2023 report, “Israel made a rapid ascent on the 2023 list, becoming the source for more than 75 percent of journalist killings, and rising to the sixth-worst jailer of journalists after the start of the Israel-Gaza war on October 7.” In addition, CPJ estimated that “128 journalists have been killed since the beginning of the war, almost all of them Palestinian media workers in Gaza killed as a result of Israeli airstrikes. Some of the journalists died while wearing protective gear identifying them as members of the press.” The staggering statistics highlighted the perilous conditions facing Palestinian journalists and the lack of global attention of their current conditions.

The number of journalists forced into exile has been rising alarmingly because of threats, repression, and national and regional conflicts. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, only between January and June 2024, they have provided financial support to 158 journalists, with about 64 percent of them having fled their home countries or in the process of fleeing. Moreover, a United Nations report documents thousands of journalists who have fled their homelands in recent years to escape political repression and conflict.

Don't Shoot the Journalists: Migrating to Stay Alive is a timely volume that resulted from insightful presentations, conversations, and reflections at the “Extra! Extra! Don't Kill the Messenger: Migrating to Stay Alive” symposium hosted by the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication in April 2024. I had an opportunity to address that audience on journalism in exile, summarizing the situation of Venezuelan news media professionals who now work and survive as a growing diaspora.

The situation of journalists in the country where I was born and raised, Venezuela, is challenging. In April 2024, YouTube influencer Oscar Alejandro spent thirty-two hours detained and accused of terrorism and acts of hate because of a comment he made on a video while walking in Caracas at night. The arrest raised concerns about violation of freedom of expression and human rights abuse.

On April 1, 2024, senior editor of Voz Media, Orlando Avendaño, was falsely accused by the Nicolás Maduro regime on charges of “inciting hatred.” The Prosecutor's Office accused Avendaño, without evidence, of subverting order and calling for rebellion on X (formerly known as Twitter). The pros¬ecutor mentioned a tweet the journalist had written several weeks before in which he spoke of an insurrectionary spirit, alleging that opposition leader

María Corina Machado pays Avendaño as part of an operation of her politi¬cal party Vente Venezuela, and that he is part of a much larger conspiracy of assassination in association with former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe.

A complex interplay of political, economic, and social factors shapes the media landscape in Venezuela. This landscape has become unsustainable since the military cracked down on protesters and journalists after the coun-try's presidential elections of July 28, 2024, when the regime declared victory without showing evidence.

As the director for the University of Oregon Global Studies Institute, I recently had an opportunity to travel to Tokyo for an inspiring and thought-provoking Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) meeting with senior international leaders. The timely keynote, “Higher Education in the Age of AI,” by Keio University President Kohei Itoh provided a forum for leaders to share their concerns about the ways artificial intelligence will affect students and faculty. On this trip, I also had the chance to reconnect with an old friend, Masayuki Ebihara, who stayed with my family as an exchange student in Oregon almost forty years ago. As Masayuki guided me through Tokyo, we reminisced about our decades and miles of global friendship. He shared a beautiful story about his favorite place we visited in Oregon’s high desert, Scout Lake, where on a clear August night the dark sky opens to a magical sea of stars and the Milky Way. Masayuki had never seen so many stars and marveled at the magnificence of the night sky. He shared the power of global experiences of stepping out of his comfort zone to travel with new people, places, and experiences.

Throughout this book are multiple perspectives from the “Extra! Extra! Don’t Kill the Messenger: Migrating to Stay Alive” symposium, which was funded in part by the University of Oregon Global Justice Program through a generous gift from the Savage Endowment for International Relations and Peace. The fund was established to bring experts on international relations, peace, and United Nations systems to the University of Oregon. While we cannot take all our students to all the places in the world, we can, via financing such as this fund, bring the world to our campus. Through such activities, students appreciate the global community far beyond the borders of Oregon.

The number of media organizations operating in exile is growing as journalists seek refuge from conflict, closing democratic spaces, and political persecution in record numbers across the globe. While there is no precise count of the numbers of journalists forced out, media assistance organizations are dealing with an unprecedented level of demand: In 2020, the Committee to Protect Journalists provided immigration support letters and grants for necessities such as rent and food to journalists in exile sixty-three times. Between January and June 2024 alone, CPJ helped 101 journalists who had left or were in the process of leaving (Westcott, 2024).

Many are determined to continue reporting, battling intense personal and operational challenges to keep the lights on in their home countries. In doing so, they can play a vital role in providing an alternative to regime narratives and disinformation—and in holding authorities accountable. They can cover stories too hot to handle for remaining media, and their reporting provides crucial information that foreign journalists cannot obtain. Exile is rarely a temporary state, so media outlets moving into exile must establish ways to reconfigure and sustain their operations from afar.

This global community of exiled media is fragmented, linguistically diverse, geographically dispersed, operating with heightened security protocols, and largely under the radar. This can render their needs less visible to the networks of donors and organizations who can support them, and whose strategies must evolve to meet a new normal in which large swaths of independent media sectors are forced offshore. Existing mechanisms to support exiled media do not meet the moment.

At dawn, one ghastly day in the early 1970s, my family home in Sausalito, California, exploded in flames. My mother ran out the front door, my father escaped through the back door. Not knowing that my father successfully evacu¬ated, my mother reentered the burning house looking for him. That search through the flames severely burned her legs; she spent the next six months at Stanford Hospital, recovering. My father's physical injuries were relatively minor.

I was living about a mile down the hill and, as best I can figure the timeline, driving toward the Golden Gate Bridge as the fire raged, heading to my job as the morning news reporter on radio station KSAN.

The cause of the fire never was in question. Inspectors quickly determined that accelerant was spread across the wooden front porch and lit. But the bla¬tant arson case never was solved. There were no suspects. No other houses in that era were torched in such a manner in Sausalito. Nothing about the gray mid-20th century façade distinguished it to attract random attention: no post¬ers, no flags, no graffiti, no bumper sticker on the car—nothing to trigger the wrath of someone to do harm.

KSAN was well known at the time as an “underground” station. We were famous for our highly opinionated newscasts: overtly against the Vietnam War, for example, and championing the counterculture which we embraced as participants.

As a public figure, I was not afraid about potential risks our newscasts could stimulate, acts performed by listeners who disagreed with us. But I was judi¬cious. In that pre-internet, pre-cell phone era, relative personal anonymity was possible, even for those of us whose names were in the public domain (and I used my real name on the air). My mailing address was a post office box. My telephone number (when phone books often included street addresses) was unlisted.

But I made a mindless and obviously serious error. My surname is not com¬mon. And I often spoke on the radio about living in Sausalito. At the time there were only two listings in the Marin County phone book for Laufer—one was in San Rafael (no relation), and the other was my parents at 164 Spencer Avenue, Sausalito. Artists, they lived a private life with a small circle of friends and no enemies.

Once on a flight from Mexico City, I sat beside a journalist from Chiapas. I asked if it was dangerous for him in that southernmost Mexican state. He replied with a dicho: El serpiente solo pica el que anda descalsos. The serpent only bites the one who walks without shoes. In other words: With care, you may survive. Then he told me how it goes when something happens where he lives. First, he may file a local report, telling what occurred, when, and who was there. But in a day or so, a journalist at the big paper in Ciudad México may put this event in context—this incident resulted from something that happened earlier, or it may be part of a pattern. Understanding begins to deepen, con¬necting the dots. And then, he said, with luck, a commentator, a cronista, may find the bigger story, the meaning hidden behind this local event. Perhaps activist coffee farmers were attacked just when their season's crop was ripe, so the incident crippled their production. Perhaps the date of the attack was the anniversary of the killing of a journalist, and the incident was intended as a warning to reporters. On the ground, he said, there is rumor. But then there is reporting: fact, then consideration, then insight.

This made me think how truth can be hidden, sometimes on purpose, but sometimes simply by the stubborn layers of mystery that structure our perceptions.

In Bhutan, I learned the Buddhist notion that reality offers four thresholds to perception. Each place, each event, each encounter may hold (1) the visible, (2) the invisible, (3) the secret—and (4) the deeply secret. I love how three of these four layers are hidden, in essence mist, requiring us to be seekers, and to get help from those gifted with investigative skill and insight.

Then these four layers of perception reminded me of something I learned from reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Bishop Desmond Tutu and others, that was formed to heal South Africa following the turmoil and tragedy of apartheid. To return the community to habits of interactive respect and inclusion, the commission found, it was necessary to distinguish four kinds of truth:

Forensic Truth: What can be documented by evidence, photograph, hospi¬tal record, verified report: This happened in fact.

Beatrice Morrow Cannady was a Black woman who worked as an editor and activist in Portland, Oregon, between 1912 and 1936.

Her story, viewed in conjunction with hundreds of issues of The Advocate, brings to life a tumultuous period in Oregon, when Blacks throughout the state were racially exiled because of Jim Crow segregation restrictions. They were further exiled by terrifying events such as the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan and repeated showings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation.

The Advocate kept the Black community informed about local and national issues and championed civil rights. As Cannady observed in 1931, “There are many reliable subscribers who do all they can to support us both morally and financially, for they realize what a terrible calamity it would be for the colored people not to have a mouthpiece in the community.”

This role was critical—especially in a city such as Portland, where White allies were scarce.

I found a beautiful image of a young Cannady on the Oregon Historical Society website in 2002. I had lived in Oregon for more than a decade by then, but I had never heard about her or the weekly Advocate. Intrigued, I printed the small photo and the few biographical sentences that accompanied it.

Cannady kept pulling me back into her orbit. I found brief mentions of her or The Advocate in a few publications such as these, but no one had explored her career in a documented biography. And so in 2004, I slipped a reel of microfilm onto the spindle of the massive machine in the library, brought The Advocate into focus, and began learning about Beatrice Morrow Cannady.

Beatrice Morrow was born at home in Littig, Texas, on January 9, 1889. The township had been established six years earlier on a parcel donated by her grandfather, Jackson Morrow, a former slave. The Morrow clan, including Jackson and his wife, Lucy, owned homes there, tilled the soil, reared children, and buried loved ones.

Exiled journalists live two realities. One in their relatively safer new home, where life’s ephemera and daily survival demand their presence and attention. The other is the painful longing for an imperfect home and for the friends, family, and colleagues who may be threatened not only by a regime’s daily course of action, but in an exacerbated threat environment because of an exile’s activities.1 The stress of this bifurcated reality is often hard for individuals to manage, but the exiled journalistic role many choose to continue to play is critical to help with democratic change in the home country.

Exiled journalists perform a role that is greater than informing a public back home of injustices and corruption.2 They are effectively opposition forces to their home regimes. They are also lobbyists abroad and change agents who increase international pressure. They are witnesses and provide testimony to foreign judicial systems and multinational organizations focused on the demand for human rights, dignity, and regime transparency. As a result, they make themselves, their relatives, and others associated with them global targets. In a more globalized world with a regime’s instantaneous access to information and to an individual’s activities, those threatened by exiles have found ways to silence those exiles.

The massive pickup truck was spotted by a professor colleague of mine. It was rolling slowly through our bucolic university town. But it was the bumper sticker, not the pickup, that held his gaze: “The media is a virus,” it threatened. “I am the cure.”

“The FAKE NEWS [his uppercase of course] media is not my enemy,” Donald Trump tweeted to his followers during his first term as US president. “It is the enemy of the American people.” And he repeated the characterization over and over again.

The pickup truck driver was paying attention.

So was thirty-nine-year-old Patrick Thomas Egan. Egan was arrested in December 2024 (after Trump’s election to a second term as president) when he followed—while driving a marked taxi—Colorado TV reporter Ja’Ronn Alex into Grand Junction. The sober play-by-play of the police report adds tension to the drama.

“Ja’Ronn advised that when he returned to Grand Junction, he came to a stop at the stoplight on Highway 6 & 50 at 25 Road. He reported that the same taxi cab that had followed him from Delta had pulled his vehicle up next to him at the stoplight.

“Both Ja’Ronn and the driver of the taxi cab rolled their windows down. Ja’Ronn explained the driver, later identified as Patrick Egan (DOB: 04/30/1985), had begun to shout at him saying something to the effect of, ‘Are you even a U.S. Citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!’”

Reporter Alex is a Pacific Islander, born in Detroit, with a degree from Clemson University. He drove to the KKCO /KCJT studios, parked his marked news cruiser and ran toward the TV station’s door. Back to the police report:

“Ja’Ronn explained that he began running toward the front door when Patrick chased after him. He reported that while Patrick was chasing after him that he was demanding Ja’Ronn’s ID and asking him if he was an American. He also repeated that he was a Marine and took an oath to defend the country. Ja’Ronn reported that Patrick then tackled him to the ground causing his injuries. Patrick got Ja’Ronn into a headlock and began to strangle him.

When I first came to Mexico to work as a foreign correspondent in 2008, I knew nothing about the Mexican press or its history. At the US-based news agency where I worked, The Associated Press, we were told two things: first, we could not pick up information from the Mexican press without verifying it ourselves independently. The rigor and ethical standards for reporting were not the same. Second, we had to vet all Mexican freelancers working for the AP carefully because of the corruption in the press corps. We did not want journalists paid under the table by politicians, narcos, or other interests to compromise the integrity of the AP. At the time, we considered Reforma the most reliable day-to-day source, and we used the new twenty-four-hour television news service Milenio, akin to a Mexican CNN, as a tip sheet for breaking news around the country.

I learned over time that the general impression of the Mexican media was that it remained docile and full of corruption after many years of control under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country as a one-party system for seventy-one years. Although media companies in Mexico are private, they did the government’s bidding for decades and adhered to the party line in exchange for huge publicity contracts and pay under the table. PRI politicians over the years were known to buy journalists houses, cars, and vacations that they could never afford on their meager salaries—a phenomenon pioneered by President Miguel Alemán in the 1940s.

There were exceptions of course. Proceso magazine was founded in 1976 after director Julio Scherer was ousted from the traditional newspaper Excelsior, where he tried to create critical and independent journalism. While the newspaper’s editorial management was taken over by a coup of insiders, it was widely believed that then-President Luis Echeverria personally deposed Scherer for the negative coverage. The aggressive investigative magazine Zeta in Tijuana was established in 1980 in the same spirit. Reforma, founded in 1993, was relatively new when I arrived, an experiment in American-style independent journalism under a Mexican director who had been educated at the University of Texas at Austin.

In her essay, “Reading Latin America Through Edward Said,” Argentine journalist Natalia Vinelli (2017) makes the case that Western news organizations too often represent Latin America through the lens of two competing tropes. On one hand, Western media celebrates the “perfect Latin American,” an ideal citizen in a global, capitalist economy. The perfect Latin American is charming, open to Western modernity, and aligned with United States interests. By contrast, Vinelli argues that newsrooms perpetuate the trope of the “authentic Latin American.” Childlike, backward, and attracted to authoritarian leaders. They cannot be entrusted with making decisions for their own futures.

That Western news organizations would perpetuate these stereotypes is not necessarily surprising. As Walter Mignolo (2005) has argued, the very idea of Latin America is an invention that has effectively served the colonial project. The term “Latin America” may purport to represent a region that exists objectively there, but it is only loosely based on geographic location. Rather, it is more useful to think of Latin America as a racialized construct, in which Spanish-speaking, racially mixed, and backward people are held up in opposition to a racially pure, functioning, English-speaking North America.

What may be surprising, however, is the degree to which large Latin American news organizations have themselves promoted this narrative that Latin Americans lack agency. In an act that Vinelli terms “internal Orientalism,” journalists working within these large, centralized news organizations across Latin America are inclined to perpetuate hegemonic discourses. To move past this way of thinking, Vinelli takes up Edward Said’s call for a decentered approach to news production. That is, to create and support alternative news organizations that do not cover Latin Americans as victims, or as infantilized peoples, but as a “diverse we” (Vinelli, 2017).

Death, kidnapping, and disappearance are the main strategies used by mem¬bers of organized crime to silence, intimidate, attack, and harass journalists in Mexico, in some cases with the tolerance and complicity of governments in power.

From “La Mañanera,” the televised daily news conference/lecture through which former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promoted his poli¬cies, he used all his power to attack, disqualify, lie, and foment hatred against journalists who did not share his ideals. He dared to promote the slogan “hugs not bullets,” openly meeting with relatives of members of organized crime and minimizing the dangerous and criminal actions carried out by drug-traffick¬ing groups against society.

The current administration of Claudia Sheinbaum, from the Morena Party, seems to follow the same logic as López Obrador. The cases of dead, missing, and kidnapped communicators and media workers do not seem to stop. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in the last thirty years, 153 journalists have been executed and thirty are missing, putting Mexico at the top of the list as the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. The true number of murdered and missing journalists is likely much higher than official reports suggest.

We want to thank the University of Oregon for the “Extra! Extra! Don't Kill the Messenger” symposium. It is in our interest to be with you, to denounce what is happening in Mexico, to ask for solidarity, to ask for support, and to acknowledge how Mexico has become a cemetery of journalists. Like the docu¬mentary State of Silence, “Extra! Extra!” made visible the sad and painful situa¬tion of journalists who are forced to leave their communities or go into exile to save their lives and that of their relatives. The documentary, exhibited at the symposium, is raising awareness in the countries where it has been screened. The film tells the story of four Mexican journalists who fled their communities to save their lives. It presents shocking images and the testimonies of journalists including the two of us, natives of Chiapas.

We have denounced labor crimes and sexual exploitation of minors of Central American origin.