Professor Kivimäki joined the University of Bath in January 2015. Previously he has held professorships at the University of Helsinki, University of Lapland, and at the University of Copenhagen. Professor Kivimäki has also been director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (Copenhagen) and the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Helsinki.

In addition to purely academic work Professor Kivimäki has been a frequent consultant to the Finnish, Danish, Dutch, Russian, Malaysian, Indonesian and Swedish governments, as well as to several UN and EU organizations on conflict and terrorism.

In his new book Failure to Protect. The Path to and Consequences of Humanitarian Interventionism (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) Professor Kivimäki revealed new patterns in contemporary warfare, and made sense of them by looking at political discourses and cases of unilateral humanitarian intervention. His conclusions on unilateral pattern of humanitarian intervention are damning: humanitarian interventions contribute to the increase in the number of fatalities among civilians and to the weakening of state capacity to contain violence. In his forthcoming projects Prof. Kivimäki will look at the opportunities of protection of civilians by the UN (Protecting the Global Civilian from Violence: UN Discourses and Practices in Fragile Countries. Routledge 2020/2021) and by regional actors in their own region.

Kivimäki's previous book Paradigms of Peace (London: Imperial College Press, 2016) assesses the contribution of various social scientific paradigms to peace research and peace and sets an agenda for constructivist pragmatist peace research. The Long Peace of East Asia by Kivimäki (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) offers a constructivist understanding of the relative peace of East Asia since 1979. Kivimäki's book, Can Peace Research Make Peace. Lessons in Academic Diplomacy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), was nominated for the prestigious Best Book Prize by the Conflict Research Society in year 2014. Kivimäki's recent articles on peace and conflict topics were published in the Chinese Journal of International Relations, Pacific Focus, the Pacific Review, International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of International Relations and Development, Asian Security and the Middle East Policy.

Dissertations on the relationship between state fragility and conflict, as well as on the international efforts at protecting civilians in fragile and predatory states.