A line-up of uprooted leaders and rebels, from a Libyan royal who has never set foot in her family’s homeland to the grandson of the last king of Italy.

Benny Wenda was granted political asylum by the UK in 2003, and now lives in Oxford with his wife Maria and six children. Growing up with the looming presence of the Indonesian military in his mountain village in West Papua, Wenda’s Lani people underwent decades of trauma as Indonesia sought to control the nation. In 1999, Wenda became leader of DeMMaK, a West Papuan independence organisation: much to the anger of the Indonesian government. In 2002 he was arrested on charges of arson and violence following riots. His defence said he wasn’t even in the country at the time of the attacks. Wenda was smuggled to the UK midway through the trial. He still campaigns for West Papua’s independence, and tours with his tribal band The Lani Singers. “My struggle is not only political, but it is for my nature, my forest, my mountain and the rivers,” says Wenda. “I will return when West Papua is free. My heart is with my people.”

Rebiya Kadeer is known as “the Mother of the Uyghurs”, the Chinese Muslims whose struggle for promised autonomy from Beijing is largely overshadowed by Tibet’s parallel crusade. That changed in 2009, during a cycle of riots which Kadeer has been accused of instigating.

Kadeer, 64, was a department-store mogul in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region, as her husband joined the Uyghur self-determination movement. In 1996, after time in prison, he sought asylum in the US, as Kadeer stayed behind in China. She enlisted in Uyghur activism and was jailed in 1999. Upon release six years later, she followed her husband. Her two sons remain in Chinese prisons.

Her Munich-headquartered World Uyghur Congress has considered basing itself nearer China but for now Kadeer feels exile in Washington is, at least, serving Uyghur interests. “The fate of many peoples and countries are dependent on what happens, if not decided, here.”

For two decades, Win has carried the title of prime minister of a self-proclaimed government-in-exile, even as he became a serial exile from Burma and then Thailand. He has been repeatedly re-elected to the post on secret ballot at the parliament’s regular meetings, which have been held in Europe and the US. The National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma last convened at a Dublin hotel. Just over 30 legislators showed up, barely one-tenth of the National League for Democracy parliamentary bloc elected in the 1990 vote that the military regime refuses to recognise. Many of those elected alongside Win have died or remain in Burma and are inactive in politics. A new generation of Burmese exiles are rising through the ranks in Thailand but Win has met few of them. “Now that I’m stuck here, it is difficult for me to have personal knowledge about the young people,” he says.

In the aftermath of General Gaddafi’s coup d’état in Libya in 1969, the al-Senussi royal family fled the country and has since remained in exile, scattered everywhere from Cairo to Rome to Geneva.

Based in London, Princess Alia is the 27-year-old granddaughter of Libyan political leader Prince Abdallah al-Senussi. Born in Washington to her Libyan father and an American mother, Princess Alia has never visited the homeland her family briefly reigned over, yet she still feels a deep connection with the nation and the Arab world in general, having spent much of her childhood in Cairo.

Princess Alia stays true to her bloodline professionally, and now works on the Tate Gallery’s Middle Eastern and North African acquisitions committee, and also serves on Art Dubai’s board of patrons. “I would love to be a part of the future of Libya,” she says. “I love to think I could be a part of forging positive social policy there through arts initiatives.”

The grandson of the last king of Italy, hrh Prince Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia, Prince of Piedmont and Venice, was born in exile in Geneva in 1972. For over 50 years, the male line of the Savoy monarchy was banned from entering Italy following their support of Mussolini’s fascist government. The Prince was employed at a hedge fund in Geneva. “It was like living next to the best chocolate shop when you’re on a diet,” he says, “seeing beautiful Italy through the window and I couldn’t get in.”

The prohibition was abolished in 2002. Later that year, the 31-year-old Prince visited his motherland for the first time with his father Vittorio Emanuele following an official invitation from the Pope. Still a Genevan resident, the Prince now regularly returns to Italy: he has run for a seat as an Italian Europarliamentarian, appeared on the Italian Dancing with the Stars, and co-presented last year’s Miss Italy pageant.

When Thach Thach, 56, calls into Voice of Kampuchea-Krom, an internet radio station, he hopes his words reach his birthplace: the pocket of southern Vietnam rich with an ethnic-Cambodian past. The 1970s wars engulfing Indochina made the Khmer Krom a target from all sides, and drove Thach’s family to Cambodia before spending years in a Thai refugee camp. They reached Canada in 1988, where Thach helped open Ontario’s first temple and grew active in community political work. “I started thinking we would have to do something not to let people kill Khmer Krom,” he says.

Thach has returned once to Cambodia and says he would not be welcome in Vietnam. Thach hopes that cultural programming will link young Khmer diasporans to their history. “It’s hard for us to motivate youth abroad. It’s not like youth in Vietnam or Cambodia, because they’re not connected to the land.”

The Chagos Archipelago is in the centre of the Indian Ocean. In the 1960s, the US government controversially opened a military base on the archipelago’s main island, Diego Garcia. Between 1965 and 1971 around 1,500 Diego Garcians were systematically deported 2,000km away to a life of poverty in Mauritius and the Seychelles, making room for the base.

“We got about £1,000 (€1,600) for losing our home and our future and everything,” says Allen Vincatassin, a Diego Garcian exile living in the UK.

Vincatassin was aged just one when his family left Diego Garcia. In 2002, he emigrated from Mauritius to the grey London satellite town of Crawley, when his people were given the right to vote in the UK. A community of roughly 2,000 Chagos Islanders now reside there. Vincatassin is founder and chairman of the Diego Garcian Society, and campaigns for his people’s permanent return to their paradise island.

Zakayev is the best-known Chechen resistance figure still alive. A professional actor turned rebel field commander, he fought in both Chechen wars and was deputy prime minister of the de facto independent Chechnya in the late 1990s. He fled to Britain in 2002. “If you are forced to leave your home country, Britain is the best place for you,” he says. Zakayev has always renounced the more extreme wing of Chechen separatism. The Kremlin, however, says he was involved in atrocities, and has issued several requests to Britain to have him extradited, all of which have been ignored for lack of evidence.

There have been rumours that the Kremlin might drop the charges if Zakayev returns to Chechnya and works with the pro-Moscow authorities. He plays this down, though does not rule it out completely. “We know from experience with the old Soviet Union it can take years for things to change, and my return depends on how the situation progresses.”

In 1970, 19-year-old Princess Esther Kamatari fled Burundi following the assassination of her father and the deposing of her uncle, King Mwanbutsa IV. Two years later, the ongoing civil war between Hutus and Tutsis kickstarted.

Once in Europe she rose to stardom as one of the first black supermodels, working for Yves Saint Laurent, Lanvin and Paco Rabanne. Proudly retaining her royal title, the princess felt she “was carrying the pride of Africa and Burundi” with her down the catwalk. She remained in exile for 10 years, before returning to Burundi in the early 1980s, and still goes back intermittently on charity missions.

In 2005 Kamatari ran for the presidential elections in Burundi with a pro-monarchy party set up by her late brother, HRH Prince Godefroid Kamatari. While she didn’t make the ballot, today she is a local councillor for a suburb of Paris, and lives there with her French husband and three children.

When Teodoro Obiang took power in Equatorial Guinea in 1979, overthrowing his uncle in a coup, he appointed Severo Moto Nsa as his minister for information. Obaing’s rule was – and still is – brutal. Moto soon quit following disagreements about how the country was run. “My resignation caused discomfort, it was a way of challenging Obiang,” says Moto from Madrid, where he has lived since 1982 after fleeing Equatorial Guinea.

From the Spanish capital he leads the opposition Progress Party and hopes to one day hold democratic elections. Yet that didn’t stop him playing a role in Simon Mann’s botched coup attempt in 2004. Moto hoped to be installed as president.

With wavering support from Spain after being arrested on suspicion of trafficking weapons to Equatorial Guinea, Moto relies on his followers’ charity. Last year he lived in a friend’s garage. “Exile is no paradise,” he says.

One memory of Tempa Tsering’s flight from Tibet’s Gyantse district in 1959 remains strong: the weight of the Buddha. “We couldn’t take much, but I had a six-inch Buddha statue tied around my waist,” he says. “It was so heavy I wanted to untie it and throw it away.”

The nine-year-old didn’t, and his father later presented it to the Dalai Lama after arriving in India. After working his way up the Tibetan lobby movement and government in exile, Tsering was appointed the Dalai Lama’s chief representative in New Delhi in 2007. He is also a senior member of the task force negotiating with China. The 60-year-old says he won’t return to his homeland until the Chinese government accepts the Dalai Lama’s proposal for genuine autonomy.

“At the moment, if I want to go back I would have to go to the Chinese embassy, declare myself as Chinese and take Chinese travel documents,” he says.