Kimana Zulueta-Fülscher, PhD, is Senior Advisor at the Constitution-Building Programme.

Zulueta-Fülscher was the Acting Head of the Constitution Building Programme, while the Head of the programme was on special leave for 18 months (2020-21). Previous to that she was Programme Manager of the MyConstitution Project, located in Yangon (Myanmar) (2018-2020), and before she was the Senior Programme Officer in the Constitution-Building Programme, based in The Hague, Netherlands, and coordinator of the task team on conflict sensitivity.

Her research and work focuses on comparative constitutional process and design, with a special emphasis on constitution-building processes in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Amongst others, she developed the database on constitution-building processes in conflict-affected settings, and published papers on Interim Constitutions as Conflict Management Tools (2015), Sequencing Peace Agreements and Constitutions in Political Settlement Processes (co-authored with Prof. Christine Bell, 2016), Substate Constitutions (co-authored with Dr Asanga Welikala, 2017), (S)electing Constitution-Making Bodies in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Settings (co-authored with Sumit Bisarya, 2018), How Constitution Making Fails (2023), and the Role of Constitutions in Natural Resource Governance (co-authored with Prof. Christina Murray, 2024). She is also the former head of the Democracy, Conflict and Security unit, where, amongst others, she managed a project on the nexus between organized crime and politics, and developed International IDEA’s institutional policy on mainstreaming conflict sensitivity.  

Before her time at International IDEA, Kimana was a senior researcher at the German Development Institute (currently the German Institute of Development and Sustainability) where she worked and published in the area of political transformation in fragile contexts. Earlier she worked for the European Partnership for Democracy in Brussels; she was a post-doctoral fellow at the EUISS, Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University; she was a researcher in the democratization department of the European think tank FRIDE, a political risk analyst for Exclusive Analysis in its Western Europe division, and an international elections observer for both the OSCE/ODIHR in Kazakhstan and Armenia, and the OAS in Mexico.

Zulueta-Fülscher has been awarded a number of pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships, including from the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Science, and the Schuman-Fulbright Foundation. She has a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain (2007), and has lectured at the University of Edinburgh. She is part of the German civilian expert pool for peace operations since 2011, and part of the United Nations Development Programme Crisis Response Roster on Governance and Constitutions since 2017. She was also a member of the selection committee for the 2017 Peace Prize of the City of Ypres, Belgium.