Timo Kivimäki is Professor of International Relations at the University of Bath (UK) and Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Sejong Institute (Seoul, Republic of Korea). 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. Professor Kivimäki has been advisor to Finland’s former President, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari in peace processes in Indonesia’s Aceh and Papua, and in Myanmar. President Ahtisaari has publicly praised that Professor Kivimäki’s advises in Aceh Peace Talks were “vital for the success of the process” and that his help in peace processes in Indonesia and Myanmar were “worth gold.”

In his new books Protecting the Global Civilian from Violence: UN discourses and practices in fragile states (London, Routledge 2021) and 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 and UN peacekeeping. 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. At the same time UN peacekeeping is much more successful. UN's respect for local solutions, interest in facilitating dialogue rather than enforcement of its own solutions, and the focus on the poverty-related threats to human security have all been associated with the reduction of fatalities of organized violence and the strengthening of state's ability to regulate political and economic competition and contain violence. In his forthcoming project he looks at the success and failure of regional actors in their intervention into organised violence in their own region.

Kivimäki's 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 Geopolitics, the Chinese Journal of International Relations, Pacific Focus, the Pacific Review, Social Sciences, Journal of Refugee Studies, Global Society, Journal of International Peacekeeping, International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of International Relations and Development, Asian Security and the Middle East Policy.