Outsiders on the Inside

This article explores how surveillance and suspicion shape ethnographic criminology. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with West African cocaine dealers, it examines ‘the social life of criminalisation’ and its impact on ethnographic practices and immersion. Ethnographers commonly strive to become ‘outsiders on the inside’, balancing participation and observation. However, in the context of criminalisation, where social worlds become surveilled and counteracted, this betwixt and between positionality is often misinterpreted as the hallmark of undercover police, snitches, and emissaries (see also Højer, this issue). The article argues that we need, in such situations, to rework our classical ethnographic modus operandi and ideals in order to be able to research and grasp the encountered insecurity and uncertainty. In doing so, we should embrace our ethnographic difficulties and failures as keys to both methodological advances and empirical insights.