UAB History student wins the Government of Catalonia's Young Research Award

The ICIP Alfons Banda Award is an initiative of the International Catalan Institute for Peace (ICIP) that recognises the best work of students in upper secondary education in the field of building a culture of peace and non-violent conflict management. The award is part of the Young Research Awards, organised by the Agency for the Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) of the Government of Catalonia, which aims to promote the scientific spirit and creativity of young people through research and knowledge.

Nerea Rueda prepared her research work at the Institut Martí Dot in Sant Feliu de Llobregat. “The main motivation for choosing the topic was to give a voice to this group that has been so harshly punished with silence for decades,” Rueda says.

The aim of her work was to fill a historiographical gap, since the Spanish Civil War displaced more than one million people from a country of some 20 million inhabitants, not counting the wave of Republican refugees who went into exile at the end of the war. Rueda investigated the reason why these people became refugees and then inquired about the Catalan civilian response and that of its authorities.

To do so, she consulted a total of 44 written and audiovisual archives and analysed letters, records, news and interviews from the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona and photographs from the Democratic Memorial. After carrying out an exhaustive analysis of all the sources, she interrelated the information with the general context of the war in order to produce her final conclusions.