Protex is an international research project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and hosted by the Center for War Studies at University of Southern Denmark. It examines how the European Union, the United Nations and the African Union practice protection of civilians as part of their increasingly complex and intertwined governance agendas.

The research focuses on the protection of civilians in three African territories (Mali, Central African Republic, and Somalia). Here, the EU, UN and AU are all present to deliver various forms of protection and simultaneausly achieve other goals such as counter terrorism, stabilization, state-building, etc. This indicates the existence of a protection regime complex whereby a constellation of actors, institutional settings and policy frameworks define differently who should ‘do’ protection and/or be protected, why, how, when, and for how long.

Protex sets out to bring novel insights about the international community’s capacity to protect civilians from violence by analyzing the international practices that constitute the protection regime complex.