Studying Violence in Africa: Contributions from Sources, Fieldwork Challenges and Ethical Considerations

Even since Weber and Durkheim made it a major intellectual topic, violence has been a research object with significant emotional, partisan, and ideological power (Arendt 1972; Howell and Willis 1989; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004; Jones and Rodgers 2019). Although it increasingly raises questions that concern the human and social sciences in general, the topic simultaneously requires an interrogation of methods and ethics concerning access to fieldwork, the nature of collected sources and...