This is a methodological essay drawing on Payne’s fieldwork in societies emerging from authoritarian rule and armed conflict. She reflects on the practical and ethical challenges of researching both state agents who committed abuses and the victims who suffered them, including questions of access, trust, safety, retraumatization, and researchers’ own complicity and emotional responses. Payne emphasizes how unequal power relations, institutional settings (courts, prisons, NGOs), and broader political struggles over memory and accountability shape what perpetrators and victims are willing or able to say. The piece proposes concrete strategies—such as careful preparation, ongoing ethical negotiation, triangulation of testimonies, and systematic reflexive note‑taking—to make such research both more empirically rigorous and more ethically responsible, while acknowledging that working in this terrain inevitably involves tensions and ambivalences that can never be fully resolved.