The Portugal, Cold War International Law, and the Refugee Convention (POLITIC) project seeks to investigate the ways in which Cold War politics shaped Portugal’s accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention in 1960, fourteen years before the Carnation revolution marked the country’s break from authoritarian rule. While scholars have examined the relationship between the Cold War and Portugal’s membership in the NATO alliance, the context of its accession to the Refugee Convention remains largely uncharted. This is visible not only in the literature on the Estado Novo, but also in the scholarship on Cold War international law, part of which has explored how the Cold War shaped international refugee law.
Seeking to address this gap, POLITIC will investigate Portuguese governmental acts (1958-1960), as well as the legal and political works of key mainland Portuguese authors and figures from the colonies (1950s-1974). The project has three main objectives:
-
- To understand better the relationship between Portugal’s accession to the Refugee Convention and the Cold War;
-
- To shed light on the relationship between authoritarianism, the Cold War and the Refugee Convention;
-
- To contribute to debates on the legacies of the Cold War in contemporary times.
Team: Veronica Corcodel (Principal Investigator), Jeremy Sarkin, Tatiana Morais.
Consultants: Luís Nuno Rodrigues, Robert Barsky, Günter Frankenberg, Cristina Nogueira da Silva.
This project is funded by the FCT under the Exploratory Projects scheme for a period of 18 months.