This discussion of fieldwork failure draws on my experience conducting research in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in 2015 as part of my doctoral studies which focused on the legacies of wartime sexual violence. Seeking to understand how complex subjects are produced by and produce themselves against post-conflict justice processes, this research located a series of intersecting frames of recognition. Inspired by Judith Butler (2006; 2009), these frames were visibility, legal-bureaucratic recognition, psychological recognition and witnessing. In this research, emotion and affect were central. Initially recorded in the margins of my fieldwork diary and spilling into conversations with friends and family over Skype, the practice of writing with and through emotion became both an ethical imperative and a way to more fully attend to the multiple inflections of recognition within post-conflict justice. In writing this chapter, I have been prompted to reflect on this process with regard to its successes and failures. Putting instances of tears and laughter into focus, I suggest that emotions, affect, and their failures structure the research encounter in significant, and often, productive ways. Tears and laughter are examined as productive affective failures that, on further reflection, enabled both renewed insight and an embodied knowledge of the research context.

The chapter re-examines two interviews which draw forth these aspects of emotion and affect in the research encounter. Both interviews take place in the broader context of the preparation of witnesses for war crimes trials, with each organisation occupying a different position in the post-conflict justice milieu. The first failure takes place during the second of two interviews with a