Protex was an international research project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and hosted by the Center for War Studies at University of Southern Denmark. Now concluded, the project examined 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 team will continue to publish research on the topic in the coming months.

The research focused 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 set 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.