ABSTRACT
This chapter encourages researchers that, while some methodological challenges exist, undercover policing is a good topic for both theoretical and empirical enquiry and one worthwhile for scientists from a range of disciplines to pursue. It highlights several areas to orientate future research programmes and extends the scope of empirical inquiry. First, the chapter introduces undercover policing as a controversial and complex social activity, potentially harmful to citizens and communities. Second, after outlining the existing body of work in this area, it speculates how research into undercover policing can be multidisciplinary, remarking on shared characteristics and overlaps with more established fields. Third, it provides some theoretical and empirical questions to guide future multidisciplinary research on this topic to understand better the potential effects of interactions between undercover police officers, citizens and communities and how they might connect to macro-level thinking about boundaries of authority and legitimacy. Finally, with some reflections on the challenges of researching undercover policing, the chapter explains how concepts and ideas from different scientific fields such as complexity, sociology and social psychology could be applied, highlighting how researchers from various epistemic disciplines can contribute to a much-needed social scientific understanding of an important area of modern-day policing.
