Ciara Knudsen has recently returned from Afghanistan where she served as the Executive Officer for the USG Integrated Civil-Military Action Group, ICMAG at American Embassy Kabul, a joint civ-mil staff which was tasked with developing an integrated USG campaign plan for Afghanistan. Leading up to the standup of the ICMAG in 2007 and 2008, Knudsen worked with provincial teams throughout Afghanistan to unify the USG effort in the field. 
 

Knudsen was the Afghanistan Program Manager at the Liechtenstein Institute on Self Determination at Princeton University in 2004-05 and led a Princeton team from the Project on Failed States to conduct fieldwork on U.S. assistance in Liberia. She previously served in East Timor from 2000-2002 as a Social Services Advisor to the Secretary of State for Labor and Solidarity – under the United Nations’ East Timor Transitional Administration and earlier, for IRC and UNICEF. While there, she managed the development of the Department of Social Services and programs for vulnerable persons and veterans for the new government. Previously she worked on African Regional Peacekeeping for the International Peace Academy in New York. She has also worked in Northern Ireland as a human rights monitor in 1999 and 2000 and in Cambodia as an International Electoral Observer in 1998. 
 


Ciara received her Masters from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a BA in Development Studies from Brown University and the University of Zimbabwe. She speaks French, Tetun, and basic Shona, and reads Arabic.