Researching rollback: reflections on methodological and ethical difficulties

In this article, we reflect on the ethical and methodological complexities of researching gender-restrictive rollback and the movements resisting it, conceptualizing rollback as a contemporary, transnational modality of gendered violence. Drawing on our experience conducting a donor-commissioned rapid scoping review of feminist and queer anti-rollback resistance across 14 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the paper surfaces the epistemic and political risks embedded in studying violence and resistance at a distance. It engages feminist, anti-colonial and social movement scholarship to explore concerns around visibility and erasure; conceptual imposition and epistemic violence; representational risk and responsibility; and methodological nationalism and exceptionalism. Recognizing that research on rollback remains imbricated within the hierarchies of power it seeks to unsettle, we advocate for a politics of radical complicity: an approach that embraces ambivalence, acknowledges the partial and extractive nature of knowledge production, and meaningfully accompanies a range of ‘accomplices’ confronting gendered and intersectional harm. Aiming at exposition rather than resolution, we invite further reflection on how to collectively reckon with the difficulties and discomforts entailed in feminist knowledge production.