Frauke de Weijer, associate fellow at the Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School, USA. De Weijer is a development practitioner and thinker who has been active in Afghanistan intermittently from 2002 to 2011. She worked as an advisor for the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, the Ministry of Frontiers and Tribal Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture, in the fields of policy development, institutional strengthening and capacity building.  In 2010-11 she became an associate fellow at the Center for International Development (CID) at the Harvard Kennedy School, conducting research on the applicability of the concepts of complexity science to the practice of international development in unpredictable and non-linear situations of institutional change, with an emphasis on fragile states. She co-authored Fragile States: Stuck in a Capability Trap, a background paper for the World Development Report 2011 on conflict, security and development, and wrote a paper for the conference ‘Foreign Policy as a Complex System’ at the Santa Fe Institute, as well as various other articles. Currently she works at the European Center for Development Policy Management in the Netherlands.