This panel spotlights four book projects in progress that build upon these waves of scholarship while suggesting new ways for integrating core themes of refugee historiography. We take a conceptual history approach that interrogates the category of the “refugee” itself in order to link the classificatory practices of states, international organizations, and the modern social sciences with refugees' lived experiences. How has the refugee category been constructed and contested over time, by whom, and for what purposes? Which categories have functioned as alternatives or qualifiers to the "refugee" in diverse local contexts? Moreover, how did refugees engage with and reshape bureaucratic and social scientific systems of knowledge production? Each paper addresses these questions through a critical engagement with themes of empire, borders, and nationalism.

The papers share a focus on the twentieth century but span multiple geographies–including Western and Central Europe, the post-Ottoman lands, and South Asia. Together, they decenter the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention as the culmination of refugee policy over the first half of the twentieth century, and the singular origin of subsequent approaches to refugee management. Anne Schult shows how the field of demography, not only international law, was central to establishing refugees as subjects of scientific knowledge and bureaucratic categorization during the interwar period. Lediona Shahollari traces the post-1918 legacies of Ottoman schemes of refugee management, attending to the competing local and state-based categories used to describe displaced populations in interwar Albania. Pragya Kaul shows how Holocaust refugees, often thought to be the key group to inspire the UN Refugee Convention, were deeply embedded in settler-colonial schemes of the British Empire. Finally, Brandon Bloch argues that the 1951 convention itself was not the endpoint for defining the refugee in international law but the impetus for new debates on the terms of inclusion and exclusion, even within Europe.

The panel’s thematic and trans-regional approach aims to spark conversation with diverse scholarly communities represented at the AHA. We hope to engage with an audience that includes specialists in the countries and regions discussed in the papers, as well as historians of humanitarianism and human rights, twentieth-century population displacements, international organizations, and the social sciences.