Profile
Sara Hellmuller CCDP

Sara HELLMÜLLER

Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich
Spoken languages
English, German, French, Italian
Areas of expertise
  • Peacebuilding, peacekeeping, peacemaking / mediation
  • Multilateralism, international organisations UN
  • Diversity and local-global interactions
  • Norm diffusion and contestation
  • Armed conflicts
  • Knowledge production and science-policy transfer
  • Qualitative research methods and ethics of field research
Geographical Region of Expertise
  • Syria
  • DR Congo

Sara Hellmüller is a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich. Previously, she was 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 in the fall term 2022. She leads the SNSF PRIMA project "A child of its time: the impact of world politics on peacebuilding" and the SNSF AGORA project “Communicating about Peace: United Nations Peace Missions and their Mandates” hosted by both ETH Zurich and the Geneva Graduate Institute. Until 2019, she worked as senior researcher at swisspeace and lecturer at the University of Basel. Moreover, between 2017 and 2019, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Montreal. 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 has (co-)led several multi-annual research projects, such as on the role of norms in mediation (2015-2019, funded by the SNSF), civil society inclusion in mediation (2018-2020, funded by the United States Institute of Peace), and most recently on how changing world politics influence UN peace operations (2020-2024, funded by the SNSF). She has also obtained funding for shorter-term projects implemented in cooperation with partners in Lebanon, Norway, Syria, Turkey, and the United States. Her research has been published in English, French, and German and she is the author of the book “Partners for Peace” (2018, Palgrave Macmillan). In the framework of her employment at swisspeace, Sara has built up their Syria program (including direct support to the UN office of the Special Envoy for Syria from 2016 on 2018) and has been involved in several peace processes, such as in Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, and Darfur.

Expertise details

  • Impact of changing world politics on UN peace operations

  • Interaction between local and international peacebuilding actors

  • Local, national, regional, and international aspects of armed conflicts and their interplay

  • United Nations peacemaking (particularly in Syria) and peacekeeping (particularly in DR Congo)

  • Norm diffusion in mediation processes (particularly the norms of inclusivity and impartiality)

  • Knowledge production on peacebuilding and its transfer to policy and practice