Nora Roehner has obtained her master's degree in Public Policy and Management from the Universities of Konstanz (Germany) and Bergen (Norway) and her PhD in Political Science from the Free University in Berlin. She has been with the Department of Political Affairs at the United Nations in New York and has worked as a lecturer for statistics and research methods and as an independent researcher on post-conflict democratization. From 2011 to 2013 she advised the government of Afghanistan in Kabul as an embedded specialist for sub-national governance, focusing on administrative reform in the municipalities. Since her return from Kabul, she has worked for the German Ministry for Development Cooperation.