Competing logics of protection: How the European Union practices protection of civilians

Protecting civilian populations from violence is an explicit objective of the European Union’s foreign and security policy. Scholarly studies investigating the EU’s capacity to live up to such an ambition have focused on how the EU has Integrated normative frameworks such as ‘Human Security’, ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P), ‘Mass Atrocity Prevention’, or ‘Comprehensive Approach’ in its crisis management, conflict prevention and development policies. In so doing, these studies have not problematized ‘protection’ as such and have not explained how different combinations of actors, institutional settings and policy frameworks can emerge and define protection in different ways and at different times. This project will allow the applicant to carry out data collection and analysis in Brussels to spearhead research on how different logics of protection are produced and reproduced by EU institutions and with what consequences on the definition of organisational objectives.

Engelsk