The bumpy road of peace research: reflections on sharing mistakes in fieldwork

As medicine strives to find cures to illness, peace researchers strive to find cures for war-broken societies. To this end, we depend on learning from people who have survived political violence, in sensitive conflict settings. There is increasing awareness of the imperative of ethical reflection before, during and after ‘fieldwork’. However, the rocky road of doing the actual fieldwork in conflict settings is seldom part of our polished articles. The messiness, the ethical dilemmas, and our hesitations, mistakes and regrets remain hidden. We argue this needs to change. We believe it is time for conflict research to follow in the novel self-reflexive footsteps of neuroscience and psychology, and build a research culture of reflection and honesty, which includes the sharing of mistakes. If not, we will inevitably continue making the same mistakes over and over again. Reflexive honesty will make our research sustainable ethically, scientifically and financially. Our aim with this article is to open such a conversation by sharing some recent experiences of fieldwork in Nepal: what went well, what we did wrong and what we learned in this process. Hopefully, by sharing our lessons learned we can together, in time, make conflict research safer, richer and more meaningful – for everyone involved.