Politics can be a rough business. What happens when leaders lose their positions of authority, the halls of power close, and their supposed friends and allies desert them? Political defeat can come from the ballot box or the bullet, and there's a big difference between leaders who find themselves shut out of their political system but can remain in their countries and those who, through the loss of power to rivals or in a popular uprising, end up banished from their homelands.
So when a leader — whether a democratically elected figure or a brutal strongman — falls in a country where the political system is defined more by personal status than by institutions, the stakes can be high, even life-threatening. In certain circumstances, the threat of being sent to the International Criminal Court can motivate embattled leaders, such as Syrian President Bashar al Assad, to dig in and fight. In other cases, the vanquished must flee for safety abroad out of fear of retribution, prison or death at home. When the decision to flee is made, some countries may step forward to take a fallen leader, but their offers do not always come out of altruism. More often than not, the final destination of a defeated leader can be geopolitically illuminating, for the location of his or her extended exile generally depends on the foreign policy interests and domestic concerns of the host state.
If a leader must choose where to flee, the first choice is usually a patron state, oftentimes a former colonial power. A political golden parachute may even be part of the deal between a patron state and its client state leader, just as regime security can be. France is a master of this tactic, having negotiated dozens of secret defense agreements with its former colonies during the Cold War, guaranteeing the client states' national security in exchange for economic and political concessions. In certain situations, however, leaders fall as a result of a patron state's meddling, as many French-speaking African leaders discovered when they tried to reduce France's influence in their countries. When this happens, ousted leaders can end up in the state that backed them in their battle against the patron state or in an entirely neutral country. For would-be host nations, the prospect of gaining intelligence from a high-level leader of a given country, capable of providing the best intelligence regarding country-to-country relations or the decision-making process of opaque administrations, has also proved tempting — and in some cases, rewarding.
