This is a book about fieldwork. It is not yet another volume about research methods, the pros and cons of qualitative versus quantitative research, or the virtues of mixed-methods approaches. There are plenty of these guidebooks and all of them contain useful information, but they generally also turn a blind eye to the messy practice of fieldwork, which is different from reading about field-based methods and research designs. This book is about experiences of doing fieldwork. A gender-balanced group of authors at different stages of their careers, working in central and southeast Asia, the Middle East, central, west, and south Africa, the Caucasus and southeast Europe— some of them nationals of the countries under study— raise questions about and reflect on how they did fieldwork in areas of international intervention into violent conflict and/or illiberal states. These experiences are neither the sanitized versions of the messy reality of fieldwork, which we find in the majority of methods sections of research monographs and articles; nor are they the hero or adventurer stories some of us tell each other at conferences over a drink (we both plead guilty to have done this on occasion). Rather, this book assembles the frank, (self-) critical accounts of field researchers who have taken the courage to publicly reflect upon some of their mistakes and to name the dilemmas of fieldwork in violent and closed contexts— dilemmas that we can prepare to face, but that we cannot resolve (for a similar approach, see Kušić and Zahora, 2020; Rivas and Browne, 2019).

The authors in this book write from a first-person perspective focusing on personal reflections of their practices, performances and positionalities in the field. Their contributions address questions currently discussed in related literatures— such as the question of how positionality and intersectionality affect the research process (for example, Caretta and Jokinen, 2017; Dempsey, 2017; Kappler and Lemay-Hébert, 2019; Thapar-Björkert and Henry, 2004)— however, they do so not from the comfort of (meta-)theoretical positions but from their own hard-earned experiences in the field.