Acknowledgments
Thanks go to the Aga Khan Foundation and the UK Department for International Development for their generous support of this research. Along with supporting fieldwork in Afghanistan, this enabled the authors to attend various regional meetings, as well as the 2018 Geneva Conference on Afghanistan, at which a palpable shift in thinking towards Afghan connectivity was evident. The authors are also grateful to the Institute for State Effectiveness for their support for a dissemination roundtable in Washington, DC.
Fieldwork was undertaken in Tajikistan and Afghanistan in August 2018. Thanks are due to all the colleagues at various organizations under the auspices of Aga Khan Development Network who provided logistical support to Chatham House during fieldwork in Tajikistan and in Badakhshan, Afghanistan. We are also thankful to Farah Mendjour, at the Aga Khan Foundation UK, for continued and timely advice on planning the fieldwork for this paper – and for remaining supportive of our dissemination efforts.
We are grateful to Vera Chapman Browne, Anna Brown and Jo Maher for their enthusiastic and meticulous editing of this paper, and for all of their feedback, support and patience throughout the process. Finally, thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers and to colleagues at Chatham House for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper, and to the supporters of the Asia-Pacific Programme.