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Black Jesus went from fighting a civil war in the jungles of Sierra Leone to, in the aftermath of the war, making do in the “urban jungle” of the capital Freetown. By tracing his life course, this article aims to understand ex-combatants’ diminishing powers as they move from being rebel soldiers in a warzone to gangsters in a post-war environment to ageing into powerless ex-combatants, ex-gang members, sensing that they are no longer respected or even needed by anybody. It presents some of the frustrations of this ageing group of ex-combatants, in particular vis-à-vis a new, even more violent, cohort of urban gangsters—“our children” in the words of Black Jesus—that dominate the streets of cities of contemporary Sierra Leone, and the way that intergenerational relations between gangsters can change over time. Black Jesus is one of the article’s co-authors. This opens new analytical perspectives and increases his ownership over his own story.

We start this chapter by shortly summarizing the book, highlighting particularly the aspects that are crucial for this chapter, which aims to propose avenues for change. After the summary, we provide a brief analysis of how the silencing and mistreatment of facilitating researchers described in this book may be understood. Such an analysis is crucial in order to set the stage for the following and concluding part which proposes some remedies and identifies actors needed to bring change.

This article seeks to move beyond the Euro/North-centrism recurrent in methodological discussions on what we may learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. Such debates often centre on uncertainty and involuntary immobility – aspects which are hardly new for many researchers. In this article, we argue that the pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink research relations between what we term ‘contracting researchers’ in the Global North and ‘facilitating researchers’ in the Global South. Such relations are often marked by rampant inequalities in remuneration, working conditions, and visibility/authorship. Drawing upon experiences in DR Congo, Sierra Leone, and India, we argue that the pandemic increased the dependence on – and highlighted the invaluable contributions and skills of – facilitating researchers, in part slightly refiguring bargaining power. We also propose pathways for change, arguing for a strong collaborative approach and the need for institutional change, without discarding the responsibilities of individual researchers.