The UK academia has witnessed contradictory trends in the last few years: while, on the one hand, research on developing countries and fragile states is promoted by the Research Councils UK (RCUK) and by the Department of International Development (DFID) in the name of ‘impact’ and policy relevance, on the other hand new University policies about fieldwork risk and ethics, coupled with shortage of research funding, make increasingly difficult to conduct field research in these settings. In my roundtable presentation, I reflect on my own experience and ‘cultural shock’ in trying to get for the first time travel authorization for a research trip in Northern Côte d’Ivoire after moving to the UK in 2016. I was anticipating the authorization process to be a brief formality and I was expecting that my long experience of living and working in the country where I was planning to conduct fieldwork would have been considered. Instead, once the region that I was planning to visit was identified as ‘high risk’ on the basis of a map provided by the University insurance office, a bureaucratic nightmare that put not only my research but also my mental health at risk started. I was asked to fill tens of pages of forms, to provide unrealistic details, imposed restrictions on accommodation and costly ‘mitigation measures’. Importantly, this process did not, in the end, resulted into an actual increase in my personal safety in the field. While my experience might have been particularly unfortunate, evidence from other Universities suggest that it is reflective of a wider trend. I use what happened to me to reflect on how academic bureaucracies identify and ‘construct’ certain regions of the world as dangerous spaces, on how such identification prompts securitization measures that are not always relevant or realistic in the local context and on how we can resist this trend while at the same time considering the safety of field researchers.