(..) In other words, while the participant observer might be imagined as a victim of violence, he or she is rarely considered as a potential perpetrator of violence. This is linked to a particular moral bias, whereby many social scientists investigating violence often do so with an agenda, looking to find positions from which ‘to speak and write against violence’ (Nordstrom and Martin, 1992: 3). Such an endeavour is generally easier to achieve when writing from the perspective of victims rather than victimizers, for obvious reasons. Yet studying the violent is arguably just as crucial as studying their victims if we are to fully understand the complexities of violence. As Cynthia Keppley Mahmood (1996: 272) remarks in her study of Khalistani Sikh militants, ‘until it becomes fully normal for scholars to study violence by talking with and being with people who engage in it, the dark myth of [the] evil and irrational [violent] will continue to overwhelm more pragmatic attempts to lucidly grapple with the problem of conflict’.

(Dennis Rodgers "Joining the gang and becoming a broder: the violence of ethnography in contemporary Nicaragua")