In the interwar period, the League of Nations’ refugee regime relied heavily on demographic classifications—such as gender, race/ethnicity, and occupation—to render displaced populations legible and governable. Emerging legal definitions of refugees were thus entwined with demographic practices of counting, categorizing, and forecasting population movements. During and after the Second World War, when mass displacement prompted new demographic techniques and legal responses, this interaction only intensified under the management of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and its short-lived predecessor organizations. The paper traces this history through three key moments in which the terms of refugeehood were fervently debated in international fora: the creation of the Nansen passport in 1922; the emergency resettlement negotiations at Évian in 1938; and the issuance of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951. Read together, these moments show a continuous conversation between the two fields, which oscillated between cooperation and competition.
By foregrounding the co-production of legal and demographic knowledge, this paper reinterprets the emergence of the refugee as a juridical subject simultaneously embedded in population management. Not least, it also makes transparent how refugees themselves were frequently involved in this knowledge production and used it as an occasion for claims-making.