Dr. Sara Hellmüller
Haldeneggsteig 4
8092 Zürich
Switzerland
Mail:
Dr. Sara Hellmüller is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS). She currently leads a five-year SNSF PRIMA project on the impact of changing world politics on UN peace missions. Together with her team, she established a comprehensive dataset on UN peace mission mandates, the UNPMM (external page www.peacemissions.info). Sara is also co-investigator on a project that academically documents Switzerland’s first membership on the UN Security Council from 2023 to 2024 (funded by the Fondation pour l’Université de Lausanne) and is currently organizing a pop-up exhibition on UN peace missions that will be shown in four Swiss cities (SNSF Agora grant).
Sara’s research focuses on peace processes, particularly UN peace missions in various world orders, the role of norms in peace promotion, local and international peacebuilding (especially in Syria and DR Congo), as well as knowledge production on peace and conflict. She has over a decade of experience conducting research in conflict-affected contexts and has spent more than a year in eastern DR Congo.
Prior to joining the CSS, Sara was an SNSF Assistant Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute and a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University. Before that, she was a Senior Researcher at swisspeace and a Lecturer at the University of Basel and held visiting positions at the University of Montreal (Canada), Columbia University (US), and the University of Bunia (DR Congo).
Sara is the author of the book “Partners for Peace” (Palgrave 2018; German translation in 2023). She has also published articles in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Affairs, Review of International Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, Contemporary Security Policy, International Peacekeeping, and Global Governance amongst others. Sara is deeply committed to transformative science by combining in-depth empirical research with the application of her expertise in practice. She has completed mandates for international, regional, and non-governmental organizations as well as the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs in support of peace processes in Darfur, DR Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Libya. In particular, she advised the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Syria on civil society inclusion in the Intra-Syrian Talks in Geneva from 2016 to 2018.