Sara Hellmüller is a Research Professor in the International Relations and Political Science Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She is a peace researcher with over a decade of experience conducting research in conflict-affected contexts and has spent more than a year in eastern DR Congo.

Prior to her current role, she was a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich and an SNSF Assistant Professor with the Graduate Institute's Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP). She was also an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Montreal. Until 2019, she was a Senior Researcher at swisspeace and a Lecturer at the University of Basel. Sara obtained her PhD in Political Science from the University of Basel. During her doctoral studies, she was a Researcher and Research Coordinator at swisspeace, a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York, and an Affiliated Researcher at the University of Bunia in DR Congo.

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). She was also lead researcher on a SNSF Division I project on the role of norms in peace mediation (2015-2019). 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 a roving exhibition on UN peace missions that was shown in various places including New York, Stockholm, Zürich, and Geneva.

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 co-managed a project on civil society inclusion with the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Syria from 2016 to 2018.  

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.