A Political Cleavage Approach to the Impact of UN Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees

The concept of refugee is determined by the changing form and content of the relationship between rulers and ruled. Throughout political history, its meaning has transformed as a corollary to the changes in political realities. From an understanding simply as a fugitive in the Ancient and Medieval Ages, the concept gradually expanded to include people persecuted for their kin, estate, religion, class, ideology, ethnicity, race, nationality, sex, gender, and sexual orientation. In the context of globalization, the emerging transnational systems of multilevel governance are blurring the concepts of rulers and ruled, rendering the identification of entities responsible for persecution and protection more difficult. The 1951 Geneva convention proves to be the best protection tool available as its flexibility ensures the integration of new kinds of sufferings as they emerge along with historical developments. The adoption of the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees in 2018 prolongs the effort initiated in 1951 and aim to improve international protection and management of human mobility. Yet, in a context characterised by the resurgence of nativist and nation-statist ideologies, the effects the Global Compacts may have on international protection are uncertain. This article proposes a renewed theoretical framework to analyze the tension between political ideologies and multilevel organization of international protection. Namely, I draw from the political cleavage approach to explain cross-country variation in the impact of the Global Compacts on international protection. The terms ‘political cleavage’ and ‘political cleavage systems’ were introduced into political science by the late Norwegian political scientist Stein Rokkan (1921-1979) in an attempt to understand the variation in the outcomes of state formation and nation building processes in Europe. Students of the Rokkan school later extended the model to explain the cross-country variation in a variety of political phenomena in and beyond Europe. However, said approach has not been applied to international protection on a global scale. In this paper, the conflict structure is articulated around the increasing skepticism towards the universal applicability of international protection, with preferences ranging from nativism, nation-statism, regionalism, to globalism. In this framework, international protection is broken down into three dimensions to be studied: i) rights, i.e. what the various statuses of protection comprise; ii) governance, that is, the institutional architecture to assess protection claims; and iii) recognition on the part of citizens, civil society organizations and in the public sphere at large.