ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some benefits and challenges in doing ethnographic fieldwork in particularly dangerous and militarised contexts. To do this, the author draw upon her experiences as a researcher exploring on-the-ground security practices of private security contractors in Afghanistan and Nepal between January 2008 and May 2010. The chapter presents the epistemological positioning of author research with regards to feminism and postcolonial research and the need for a reflexive awareness during the fieldwork process. Ethnography, as a methodology, has deep roots in anthropology and only recently has been seen by political scientists and international relations (IR) scholars as an important methodology. Anthropologists, feminists and postcolonial scholars have long argued that ethnography is "circumscribed by a myriad of power relations", whereby the relationship between the researcher and the researched has a direct bearing on the types of information produced.
