An essential exploration of and guide to research ethics in the field. Researchers working in Africa are engaged in ethical, methodological, logistical, emotional and professional compromises. Juggling the demands of being a researcher and being human, scholars must balance the recording of data withthe emotional demands of listening, of analyzing and reporting personal, and often contradictory, narratives. This book recognizes these challenges and lays bare the underlying and important process by which the researcher grapples with emotions, and how 'feelings' inform and shape data collection, interpretation, write-up and dissemination. Based on widely researched on-the-ground work, the contributors reveal the ambiguities and inconsistences that emerge at all stages of fieldwork and how to tackle them. They examine the ethical quagmires that arise when doing research on sensitive topics in a researcher's own living environment, and suggest how to manage the complex interaction between the researcher's own identity and social relationships in the field, and navigate the role of researcher when activism risks access to the field.

Examines a new aspect of one of the highest profile issues facing Africa today-land-grabbing-and shows the widespread impact of small-scale dispossession. Dispossession of land on a small scale can have as great an impact on living conditions as large-scale land-grabs. With the increasing commodification of land, new forms of dispossession, in urban as well as rural districts, are also gaining in importance. This book looks at this largely uninvestigated issue through case studies in the Eastern DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda: here the loss of land often represents the loss of people's livelihoods inthese areas of extreme land scarcity in highly populated regions. In the post-conflict states of the Great Lakes, governance challenges increase the risk of dispossession of the already poor and vulnerable: formal institutions are weak or biased; customary authorities have lost some of their moral authority. The cases in this book show in particular how local power dynamics, often rooted in history, bear upon the processes of land competition, dispossession and land grabbing. This timely volume will be important not only for those in African Studies, but for those in development studies, as well as practitioners and policy-makers worldwide. An Ansoms is assistant professor in development studies at the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium); Thea Hilhorst is a senior advisor at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.