Project description
The Vatican’s role in post-war refugee assistance
The Vatican Relief Commission’s role in aiding and resettling refugees after World War II and during the early Cold War remains largely unexplored. Unearthing the forgotten history of post-war European refugee assistance presents a crucial challenge that the COMREF-VATICAN project aims to tackle. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, it will leverage the newly accessible section of the Vatican Apostolic Archive concerning Pius XII’s pontificate. Specifically, the project will provide valuable insights into the Vatican’s faith-based humanitarianism and its strategic use of eastern European refugees in countering communism. Through comprehensive archival research and interdisciplinary methodologies, the project seeks to shed light on the untold stories of displaced individuals, reshaping our understanding of western humanitarian efforts in the post-war period.
Objective
This project will be the first to explore the crucial – but hitherto neglected – role of the Vatican Relief Commission (the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza, PCA) in assisting and resettling European refugees after World War II and in the early Cold War. It takes advantage of an unprecedented opportunity: the opening of the part of the Vatican Apostolic Archive (or VAA, named the Vatican Secret Archive until 2019) pertaining to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) in March 2020. To meet its central aim - providing a new understanding of Western humanitarianism in the postwar period - this project interrogates the documents held in VAA to integrate the missing puzzle piece of papal aid into the picture of the international refugee assistance. It demonstrates the importance of the Vatican’s faith-based humanitarianism and its use of refugees from Eastern Europe as a playing card in building an anti-communist defensive. Three objectives are to be achieved in the lifetime of the project: A) to conduct intensive archival research in the untapped collections of VAA and to triangulate this with material from the archives of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) B) to analyze this primary source material in order to revisit historiographical assumptions on the post-war refugee regime, international humanitarianism, the Catholic Church, and the Cold War C) to disseminate the research findings to the scholarly community, the public, refugees, and policymakers, drawing attention to the importance of historicizing refugee experiences and policies. The methodology of this project combines historical analysis of original archival sources, qualitative research techniques, and interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks. Integrating institutional and bottom-up perspectives, it highlights the issues of gender, class, and ethnicity in experiencing and negotiating displacement.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology anthropology ethnology
- social sciences sociology demography human migrations
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01
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1010 Wien
Austria
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