How should we understand the globalization of the international refugee regime? A conventional understanding is that the 1951 Refugee Convention, although it put in place a universal definition of ‘refugee’ for the first time, remained limited to European refugees. But the 1951 text was not as limited as people think. Most of the initial signatories intended the convention to be applied to people displaced from anywhere, not just from within Europe. And the decisive momentum for globalization was created by African states newly independent from France.