ABSTRACT
Francis Deng’s chapter on the creation and impact of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (GPID) makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of international normative processes. 1 The chapter combines a “practitioner” perspective, based on Deng’s decade of service as the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on internally displaced persons (IDPs), with an “academic" perspective, informed by constructivist international relations (IR) theory and related approaches that emphasize the role of norms in shaping behavior. The chapter joins the growing and significant genre of “participant-observer” analyses of international governance, 2 and complements recent papers by, or based on interviews with, other participants in the GPID process. 3 Still, Deng’s central role makes his analysis unique.
