Protection Complexity: How EU, UN, and AU practice protection of civilians

Research on the international community’s capacity to protect civilians from
violence is thriving. Curiously though, it overlooks the significance of the emerging international ‘protection regime complex’ whereby a constellation of actors, institutional settings and policy frameworks define differently who should ‘do’ protection and/or be protected, why, when, for how long, and how. PROTEX is a pioneering comparative project theorizing the protection regime complex from the bottom up. It bridges ‘regime complex theory’ and ‘international practice theory’ and generates novel insights on how protection emerges as a configuration of practices within and between organizations and at field level, and on how this matters in international cooperation. Protection practices by the European Union, the United Nations and the African Union in Mali, Central African Republic and Somalia are the project’s entry point to trace what actors do (or do not) together when they protect civilians.

Engelsk