Much research on violence takes place in a way that is removed from the day-to-day experience of those caught up in it, especially so statistical analyses, which reduce motives and events to stylised behavioural patterns. Even ethnographic inquiries find themselves under pressure to organise their methods and findings around theoretical models and research protocols that may ensure rigour, but can filter out the terror and chaos on the ground, what a Tuareg elder interviewed by a contributor to this volume termed timogoutar, the ‘bad hardness’, that overwhelms victims, perpetrators and observers alike.

This excellent book is more than just a series of reflections on how to do research in ‘bad’, conflict-torn neighbourhoods. It is distinctive in delineating the dilemmas faced by researchers seeking to comprehend both the day-to-day realities and the deep structures of violence. These dilemmas are at root moral and political. Those who investigate violence must come to terms with the harm violence inflicts on bodies, identities, communities and social relationships. They should also reckon with the possibility that social inquiry itself can unleash powerful emotions, disturb fragile compromises and even bring tangible harm to those who participate. In politically charged situations, researchers cannot easily hide under umbrellas of neutrality, nor can they credibly invoke the supposedly higher moralities of peacebuilding or development.

How to navigate these dilemmas is a key question considered by contributors to this book. They highlight questions of identity, gender, positionality and intersectionality, and see them as embedded in power relations, both in violent situations themselves and in the practices of social research. The researchers cannot escape their own identities, and yet, like anyone else in situations of extreme uncertainty and violence, are obliged to renegotiate them as they go along. In a variety of interesting ways, they provide honest, self-critical and reflexive accounts of the research processes in which they were engaged. They pose more questions than they provide answers, but it is this ability to ask questions of themselves as well as of others that may be the most useful lesson they can pass on to students and fellow researchers working in fissile and fast-changing contexts of violence.