79
McGill Journal of Political Studies | Winter 2020
fore leave IDPs without an advocate or strong legal basis to assert their rights in the international system.
A MODEL FOR MAINSTREAMING IDPS AT THE DOMESTIC LEVEL Thus far, this paper has advanced an argument that identifies the lack of explicit mandate or institution dedicated to the protection of IDPs as a product of the imposition of structural constraints on UNHCR. Still missing from this analysis is the specific effect that domestic actors have on domestic leaders, which in turn shape state policy positions that determine how constrained UNHCR is in its efforts to mainstream IDPs. In this context, mainstreaming is the process of bringing the Refugee Convention into practice in such a way that it is no longer “in isolation from international human rights law.”17 While it may seem contradictory to integrate a rational choice, two-level game approach with an argument based in the constructivist nature of international politics and the refugee/ IDP regimes, it provides an important insight into the multi-level interactions that occur within the discourse surrounding IDPs and UNHCR’s work in mainstreaming them. Since constructivism argues that prevailing norms and practices diffuse amongst states in the international system and eventually come to shape their behaviour, bridging these two approaches may not be wholly irreconcilable. The theoretical basis for this argument lies first in the rational choice two-level game model where at Level I, negotiations take place between states and a tentative agreement is reached, and at Level II, the policy must be ratified and implemented through domestic processes.18 From this, the conceptual framework for overlapping areas of interest and shared win-sets emerge, such that any potential agreement among states must be feasible at both Level I (international) and Level II (domestic) to be viable. This therefore creates a need for state leaders that are negotiating agreements to ensure that such agreements have the support of their domestic constituents, as was the case for the Refugee Convention. The challenge that state leaders face is that of compassion fatigue, where there is only a finite amount of domestic support that can be mobilized across all issue areas. Compassion fatigue is particularly a problem in relation to how socially constructed interpretations of IDPs can influence individual willingness or capacity to advocate for internal displacement as an issue requiring national attention. Compassion fatigue can be defined as emotional overload when there appears to be no easy or meaningful contribution for an individual to alleviate the tragedy they are seeing, reading, or hearing. Bluntly, it is the awareness that “no five dollar contribution, no vote, no online petition will fix the problem.”19 Compassion fatigue is critically important in understanding how domestic actors influence domestic leaders to set state preferences within a rational choice model because it is disruptive to how norms of behaviour, including treatment of IDPs, diffuse between and across states. More explicitly, compassion fatigue often leads to disengagement which removes the “common experience” and “focal points” around which the “social structure and normative context shape the actions of agents” in advocating for norms.20 This disengagement thus prevents domestic actors’ advocacy efforts from reaching the tipping point where they can effec-