“You know the story how many researchers we have had in this country, and how useless most of that is/was for activists and organizations. Don't take it personally, but that is the fact.” I did not take it personally: by the time a participant told me this as part of his reply to my interview request, I had heard similar views from numerous other participants. I was in the process of planning a seven-day follow-up research trip to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), after I had already spent about six months conducting interviews and observation in various Bosnian cities earlier that year.

The purpose of that trip was to carry out more interviews with members of the civil society sector in Sarajevo, which was underrepresented in my research sample, but probably over-represented in research about post-war BiH. This specific interviewee, a long-time NGO activist, had met with dozens of researchers like me over the years and was quite straightforward that he was reluctant to keep giving up his time for research that not only would not make an impact, but that he would not even come to see and read. I ended up meeting this interviewee, keeping in touch and sending him my research results, but that is not the key point of this story. The point is that his feelings were common among members of NGOs in Sarajevo, who felt that the city had been used as a kind of ‘training ground’ for researchers, who often disappeared once their fieldwork was over.

In this chapter, I reflect on the role of researchers in BiH and postconflict societies in general and discuss in what sense their presence in the country could constitute another form of (mostly international) ‘intervention’. Based on fieldwork experience in BiH during my doctoral studies, when I stayed in the country for a combined period of about nine months between 2014 and 2016, the chapter examines the features that associate the practices of international researchers to those of the international interventions whose effects we set out to study. On the one hand, this is evidenced by the concentration of research on Sarajevo-based NGOs and activists, which is leading to a renegotiation of the relationship between researchers and Bosnian participants.