Vita - Prof. Dr. Lisbeth Zimmermann

Since 2022, Professor Dr. Lisbeth Zimmermann has held the Chair of Political Science, focusing on International Institutions and Peace Processes. Prior to this, she held the Chair of International Relations at Zeppelin University (2018-2022). Her research focuses on current challenges of the multilateral world order, international organizations, international norms, democracy and rule of law promotion, and peacebuilding.

Lisbeth Zimmermann studied political science at the Freie Universität Berlin, which was supported by a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (2002-2007). She was a doctoral fellow in the project “Transnational Democracy and Justice” as part of the Cluster of Excellence “Formation of Normative Orders” (2008-2011) and a doctoral fellow of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (2011-2012). In November 2012, she was awarded a doctorate with a thesis on “Global Norms with a Local Face? The Interaction of Rule of Law Promotion and Norm Translation in Guatemala”. She was a research assistant in the Cluster of Excellence “Formation of Normative Orders” (2012-2015). From 2015 to 2018, she was a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 

She was a visiting researcher at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington D.C. (2011) and the Department of Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence (2015). Lisbeth Zimmermann was also a fellow of the Robert Bosch Foundation's “Fast Track: Excellence and Leadership for Women Scientists” program (2015-2017).

Lisbeth Zimmermann was co-spokesperson of the junior researcher group of the “International Politics” section of the German Political Science Association (2012-2014) and co-spokesperson of the thematic group “IB Norms Research” (2017-2020). She was the spokesperson of the research cluster “Governance of Global Cooperation Networks” at Zeppelin University (2019-2022). At Zeppelin University, she supervised a group of Studienstiftung scholarship holders as a liaison professor. Lisbeth Zimmermann heads the MA program in International Studies/Peace and Conflict Research at Goethe University.

She is Principal Investigator in the ERC Starting Grant FARRIO “The Effects of Far-Right Challenges on International Organizations” (2022-2027) and in the BMBF network TraCe “Regional Research Center Transformations of Political Violence.” From 2015 to 2018, Lisbeth Zimmermann was co-head of the DFG project “International Norm Disputes. Contestation and norm robustness”. Since 2019, she has headed the DFG project “Open or Closed International Organizations: Conditions for Policy Change through Contestation.”