Drawing on the burgeoning historiography on refugees and displacement, this working paper provides an account of the post-Second World War emergence of the international refugee regime. The paper places the genesis of this regime, centred around the 1951 Refugee Convention and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in the context of interwar antecedents as well as its globalisation in the second half of the century, leading up to the present day. Building on previous SCRIPTS working papers, the paper highlights the tension between collective self-determination and individual rights inherent in the liberal script. Generally, the liberal internationalism that shaped the governance of displacement privileged selectivity and exclusion over the individual rights it proclaimed, at times, even sanctioning displacement itself. In this regard, the paper highlights three liberal motives as particularly influential: the pursuit of peace through ethnic homogeneity, Cold War competition, and the maintenance of (post)imperial hierarchy.