Third World Quarterly

What Remains: The Afterlives of Conflict Fieldwork

Conflict fieldwork rarely ends when researchers leave the field. Encounters, relationships, ethical dilemmas, emotional burdens, failed assumptions, and unresolved interpretations often continue to shape how conflict is understood, represented, and written long after formal data collection has ended. We use the term afterlives of fieldwork to refer to the continuing interpretive, ethical, emotional, relational, embodied, linguistic, methodological, political, and epistemic consequences of field encounters that shape knowledge production beyond the field itself. While these afterlives are central to how researchers make sense of conflict, they rarely appear in conventional academic and policy-oriented outputs (Khan & Degefa, 2026). As Brounéus, Bhattarai, and Forsberg (2022) observe, the ‘messiness’ of fieldwork is frequently absent from published accounts despite its significance for how knowledge is ultimately produced. The movement from field encounter to publication often transforms uncertainty into certainty, contradiction into coherence, and unresolved experiences into stable forms of evidence. Yet the appearance of methodological closure often obscures the continuing afterlives of fieldwork, which shape what researchers know, how they know it, and how conflict is ultimately represented.

Existing discussions in peace and conflict research have increasingly engaged with reflexivity, positionality, ethics, localisation, and the politics of knowledge production (Shanks & Paulson, 2022; van der Haar, Heijmans, & Hilhorst, 2013). Building on these debates, this collection starts from the premise that the afterlives of fieldwork are not experienced equally. The consequences of fieldwork do not end at the same moment for everyone involved in producing knowledge about conflict, nor do they take the same form. Researchers embedded within conflict-affected societies frequently remain accountable to participants and communities, continue navigating insecurity and political change, and carry the emotional, linguistic, and material consequences of research long after projects conclude. These realities are particularly evident for researchers from the ‘Global South’ (or Global Majority), whose field proximity, local knowledge, translation work, and collaborative labour are often essential to knowledge production yet remain under-recognised within international academic and policy spaces (Bajpai & Parashar, 2024; Jenkins, 2018; Mwambari, 2019). The afterlives of fieldwork, therefore, provide a lens through which to examine not only how conflict knowledge is produced, but also whose labour, responsibilities, and experiences remain visible in that process.

The collection invites contributions that reflect on the multiple afterlives of conflict fieldwork and their implications for knowledge production. Particular attention is given to the unequal ways in which these afterlives are experienced across Global North–Global South research relationships, and to how such asymmetries shape the production, circulation, and validation of knowledge. Contributions should engage with at least one experiential dimension of the afterlives of fieldwork, such as:

1. Interpretive afterlives: How do field encounters acquire new meanings over time, and how do shifting interpretations reshape what researchers think they know?

2. Ethical afterlives: When does responsibility to participants and communities end, if it ends at all? How are ethical obligations negotiated after formal research has concluded?

3. Emotional afterlives: How do attachment, guilt, trauma, care, or exhaustion continue to shape analysis, writing, and future research long after leaving the field?

4. Relational afterlives: What happens to the relationships formed through fieldwork, and how do ongoing connections with interlocutors, translators, facilitators, collaborators, and research partners continue to influence knowledge production?

5. Embodied afterlives: How do researchers’ gendered, racialised, classed, national, linguistic, or otherwise embodied identities continue to shape interpretation, authority, representation, and responsibility beyond the field itself?

6. Linguistic afterlives: What survives, changes, or disappears through processes of translation, interpretation, and representation, and how do linguistic choices continue to shape meaning after fieldwork has ended?

Contributions should also examine the broader implications of these experiences for one or more of the following:

7. Methodological implications: What can be learned from failed assumptions, methodological adaptations, improvisations, or abandoned approaches, and how do these experiences influence future research?

8. Political implications: How are research findings circulated, appropriated, contested, or mobilised within academic, policy, and conflict-affected settings, often in ways unintended by researchers themselves?

9. Authorship implications: Whose labour remains visible after publication, whose contributions disappear, and how are recognition, intellectual ownership, and collaborative labour negotiated?

10. Epistemic implications: What forms of knowledge survive, disappear, or remain unresolved in the movement from field encounter to publication, and what does this reveal about how conflict knowledge is produced and validated?

While grounded in concrete research experiences, submissions should move beyond description and engage with broader methodological, epistemic, political, and/or normative debates on conflict research and knowledge production.

Research notes offer a particularly suitable format for examining the afterlives of conflict fieldwork because they create space for methodological reflection, epistemic uncertainty, and forms of knowledge that often remain peripheral to conventional research articles. As a format, they allow scholars to foreground the processes through which knowledge is produced, interpreted, translated, negotiated, and validated, rather than focusing solely on the presentation of research outcomes. In doing so, research notes can help cultivate more plural and dialogical approaches to knowledge production by creating space for reflection, ambiguity, experimentation, and methodological learning. They also provide opportunities to engage critically with fieldwork itself as a site of knowledge production and to explore forms of representation that might otherwise remain excluded from academic publication. The collection therefore welcomes the use of field diary excerpts, photographs, interviews, sketches, maps, poetry, or other field-derived materials as part of a broader analytical reflection. By bringing these diverse reflections into conversation, the cluster seeks to foreground the continuing lives of field encounters and to examine how knowledge on conflict is produced, negotiated, represented, and legitimised beyond the moment of data collection itself.

References

Bajpai, R. D., & Parashar, S. (2024). Researching armed groups with facilitating researchers: Asymmetries, silences, and the extractive economies of research. Conflict, Security & Development, 24(6), 579–597.

Brounéus, K., Bhattarai, P., & Forsberg, E. (2022). The bumpy road of peace research: Reflections on sharing mistakes in fieldwork. Third World Quarterly, 43(4), 954–962.

Jenkins, S. A. (2018). Assistants, guides, collaborators, friends: The concealed figures of conflict research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 47(2), 143–170.

Khan, F., & Degefa, H. B. (2026). Filtered realities: Translating knowledge from conflictaffected borderlands to policy. Development in Practice, 36(4).

Mwambari, D. (2019). Local positionality in the production of knowledge in Northern Uganda. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1–12.

Shanks, K., & Paulson, J. (2022). Ethical research landscapes in fragile and conflict-affected contexts: Understanding the challenges. Research Ethics, 18(3), 169–192.

van der Haar, G., Heijmans, A., & Hilhorst, D. (2013). Interactive research and the construction of knowledge in conflict-affected settings. Disasters, 37(S1), 20–35.