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CCDP
10 February 2025

Welcome Back to the Graduate Institute: Dr. Sara Hellmüller

The CCDP is delighted to welcome back Dr. Sara Hellmüller to the Graduate Institute community in her new role as Research Professor in the International Relations and Political Science Department and Faculty Associate at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding. Sara is a peace researcher with over a decade of experience conducting research in conflict-affected contexts, including more than a year in eastern DR Congo.

Prior to her current role, she was a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich, SNSF Assistant Professor with the Graduate Institute's Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP), Senior Researcher at swisspeace, and Lecturer at the University of Basel. She held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, University of Montreal, Columbia University, and the University of Bunia in DR Congo. Sara obtained her PhD in Political Science from the University of Basel.

Currently, Sara is the principal investigator of a SNSF Starting Grant project focusing on belligerents’ consent to UN peace missions (2025-2029) and is the co-investigator of a project that academically documents Switzerland’s first membership on the UN Security Council (2023-2025) (funded by the Fondation pour l’Université de Lausanne). Before that, she was the principal investigator of a SNSF PRIMA Grant project on the impact of changing world politics on UN peace promotion (2020-2024) and a SNSF AGORA project on UN Peace Missions and their Mandates (2023-2025). Together with her team, she established a comprehensive dataset on UN peace mission mandates, the UNPMM, that is also available on an interactive website and mobile application (App Store / Google Play), and she curated an exhibition on UN peace missions that was shown in various places including New York, Stockholm, Zürich, and Geneva.

Sara expresses her commitment 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 various peace processes. In particular, she co-managed a project on civil society inclusion with the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Syria from 2016 to 2018.

Explore Dr. Sara Hellmüller’s recent publications:

  • Hellmüller, Sara; Bilal Salaymeh, 2025, “Transactional Peacemaking: Warmakers as Peacemakers in the Political Marketplace of Peace Processes”, Contemporary Security Policy, online first, Link. 

  • Hellmüller, Sara, 2024, “Broadening Perspectives on Inclusive Peacemaking: The Case of the UN Mediation in Syria”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 45 (5), pp. 963–980, Link.

  • Hellmüller, Sara, 2023, “Knowledge Production on Mediation: Practice-Oriented, but not Practice-Relevant”, International Affairs, Vol. 99 (5), pp. 1847-1866, Link. 

  • Hellmüller, Sara; Xiang-Yun Rosalind Tan; Corinne Bara, 2023, “What is in a Mandate: Introducing the Dataset on UN Peace Mission Mandates”, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 68 (1), pp. 166-192, Link.

  • Badache, Fanny; Sara Hellmüller; Bilal Salaymeh, 2022, “Conflict-Management or Conflict-Resolution: What Role in Peacebuilding for the United Nations in a Multipolar World Order?”, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 43 (4), pp. 547-571, Link.