Marlene Schäfers holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, UK (2016), and is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies in Ghent. Marlene specializes in the anthropology of modern Turkey and its Kurdish regions. In the SEELAB interview we will discuss Marlene’s project on death as a potent site of political engagement and social (re)generation, as well as the politics of death that unfolds around fallen fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). How is it to do research on death and dying, as the Kurdish political movement and its supporters venerate fallen guerrilla fighters as martyrs who have heroically sacrificed their lives for the Kurdish people? What are the challenges in analysing the role of the Turkish state that ferociously seeks to prevent such veneration, mobilizing enormous resources in the attempt at killing not just guerrillas’ biological bodies but also their martyrial afterlives? What makes the afterlives of these guerrilla fighters so potent to attract such intense reactions by the Turkish state, and how does their potency radiate into political and intimate lives? These are only few of the questions that will be part of our conversation with Marlene as we discuss the danger and challenges of conducting anthropological fieldwork in war-torn regions.