Before the Convention: The Spanish Civil War and Challenges for Research on Refugee History

Abstract

This article uses the tools of comparative history to address an important aspect of the Spanish Civil War: the fact that it generated waves of both internally displaced persons and cross-border refugees. Situating the conflict within the context of inter-war Europe, and particularly historical processes of deportation, forced migration, and exile, it analyses the challenges that the crisis of the war and subsequent post-war period in Spain introduced in the realm of humanitarian protection for displaced populations, and how existing international policies largely failed to protect those displaced by the conflict. Drawing on the Spanish Civil War example, the article shows how this kind of engagement with the history of refugees can produce insights that are useful for the broader body of scholarship on refugees, even for scholars who are not historians.