Knowledge on conflict-affected areas and modes of intervention is becoming increasingly important for scholarship and policy. Yet how we generate that knowledge is most often, purposely or not, hidden from the reader. In our attempt to produce scientifically valid scholarship accepted by the broader discipline of international relations (IR), we sanitize our work by eschewing ethical considerations. Ethical considerations, I would argue, are even more central when researching conflict-affected areas and vulnerable populations, or as Elizabeth Dauphinee (2010: 808) writes, ‘[t] he ethics of responsible scholarship are significant in terms of how we question, how we adjudicate between answers, and how we situate ourselves as writers, witnesses and participants’. While critical scholars have long acknowledged the normative nature of scholarly research, reflexivity is often wanting. In peace and conflict studies, we are good at exploring challenging and problematic practices of other interveners (Duffield, 2010; Higate and Henry, 2009), forgetting that we are often subject to the same practices ourselves (Peter and Strazzari, 2017).

In this chapter, I reflect on my own experiences of doing embedded research in Darfur, Sudan. I do so to, first, illustrate how practical considerations of accessing sites of conflict are entangled with ethical considerations for scholarly work and for interventions themselves, and, second, to highlight how a combination of practical and ethical constraints impacts what we can say about places we study. While I had previously conducted embedded research— most notably in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war— the two-week research visit to Darfur in November 2014 was different. This was an open conflict and, in my research, I was entirely reliant on our host infrastructure. The trip was ridden with practical and ethical challenges specifically related to conducting fieldwork in areas of open conflict, which I focus on here. To substantiate my argument, I first briefly outline what I understand as embedded research and how this practice is used as a method in peace and conflict studies. I then provide a narrative of my fieldwork in Darfur, laying out the context and practical considerations, before discussing ethical challenges of such research. Here I briefly address how the combination of practical and ethical challenges limited what I could say about the conflict and my host.