Project description
A closer look at the fear principle during the inter-American Cold War
The 1951 UN Convention and the 1967 Protocol define a refugee as someone with a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’, leaving signatory states to interpret these agreements. During the Cold War, the US primarily recognised refugees from communist countries, while other states included those fleeing authoritarian regimes and racial violence. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the CREDIBLE FEAR project will explore the ‘well-founded fear’ principle in international asylum law, focusing on personal experiences during the inter-American Cold War. It will examine civilians fleeing authoritarian regimes, Cuban refugees after the 1959 revolution, and Black activists escaping anti-communist crackdowns. The project will challenge conventional ideas of security and fear, and re-evaluate asylum eligibility.
Objective
"CREDIBLE FEAR examines the “well-founded fear” principle that undergirds international refugee and asylum law. The legal standard was enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees and the 1967 UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees; it defines a refugee as someone presenting a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home country. State signatories to the agreements could interpret and implement the pacts as they saw fit. Within the inter-American system, asylum and refugee protections generally adhered to the geopolitical logics of the global Cold War. In the United States, the term “refugee” applied almost exclusively to those fleeing communist countries; in other national contexts, ""refugees"" were those fleeing rightwing authoritarian dictatorship, anti-communist purges, and/or racial terror. To consider the dynamic personal and political experience of terror and asylum in the inter-American Cold War, I examine key historical episodes, including: 1) civilians fleeing rightwing authoritarian dictatorships in Southern Cone countries who found safe harbor in Mexico and communist Cuba; 2) Cuban refugees who emigrated to the US and Mexico in the decades following the Cuban Revolution of 1959; 3) Black radicals and communist activists from the US who fled to Mexico City and Havana in the mid-twentieth century amidst Washington's anti-communist campaigns and crackdowns on Civil Rights activism. CF weds archival, oral historical and ethnographic methods to literature from the history of emotions, Latin American and US political history, and anthropology of migration. It will destabilize prevailing conceptualizations of security, terror and fear in historic and contemporary contexts, calling for a collective reconsideration of what makes a human being worthy of asylum. The fellowship will equip me with expertise and specialized skills to place me at the forefront of my field as a public-facing interdisciplinary researcher."
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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.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences political sciences political transitions revolutions
- social sciences sociology anthropology
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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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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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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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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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30123 Venezia
Italy
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