Timo Kivimäki is Professor of International Relations at the University of Bath. In addition to purely academic work he has been a frequent consultant to the Finnish, Danish, Dutch, Russian, Malaysian, Indonesian and Swedish governments and to several UN and EU organizations on conflict.
'Part of a growing quantitative literature that claims to demonstrate empirically that peacekeeping not only works but delivers impressive return on investment, Kivimaki’s core thesis is that peace operations save lives, especially in comparison with unilateral interventions. This argument makes intuitive sense, since great power interventions – whether Russia’s 2008 incursion in Georgia or the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 – rarely pay more than lip service to PoC principles...Kivimaki’s large-N conclusions –especially set alongside the work of Lisa Hultman and others – do in fact point to a statistically significant relationship between peacekeeper presence and violence reduction.'--Timothy Donais,International Peacekeeping November 2021