Systematically investigating why some issues get on the political agenda and others receive little attention has been a traditionally difficult endeavor since the universe of issues is endless, how do we study the issue that wasn’t there? Likewise, systematically investigating the counterfactual of interest group advocacy is equally troubling, since we cannot rewrite history and either insert or remove the participation of an advocacy organization. The paper seeks to shed light on these two understudied topics by studying advocacy on a certain set of issues: protracted displacement crises. This set of issues is unique in that it is largely fixed, there are currently 42 protracted refugee and internal displacement crises that have been enduring for over a decade. In these situations, millions of people around the globe live at the edge of existence, their human rights are violated on a regular basis, and the deplorable nature of their condition threatens to spill over as insecurity to the region. In short, these are ALL issues, what varies is our attention to them in the Global North. I argue that advocacy on behalf of the displaced by civil society organizations is a key explanatory factor in understanding which displacement crises get attention and see improved access to rights and which do not. I test this theory through a mixed-methods study collecting historical data on attention to these issues in the American and European media over the last decade as well as data on the organizations advocating for attention to these issues.
