Understanding systemic corruption within the Indonesian national police

Sitepu, Erick (2026). Understanding systemic corruption within the Indonesian national police. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

The aim of the study is to critically examine how power relations within the Indonesian National Police (Polri, hereafter INP) actively constitute, reproduce, and stabilise a hegemonic and systemic order of corruption, in which corrupt practices are not simply tolerated but are organised, distributed, and legitimised through dominant norms, reciprocal obligations, and mutually reinforcing interests that bind actors across the institution. The study develops a normative–critical approach to understand how such corruption persists despite public pressure, reform demands, and anti-corruption discourses, focusing on three interrelated dimensions: first, how police officers define and make sense of corruption in everyday practice; second, how structural pressures enable and normalise corrupt practices; and third, how these practices are rationalised in ways that justify, downplay, or deny their continued existence.

In pursuing these aims, the study critiques criminology and zemiology as dominant paradigms. Criminology’s legalistic and power-bound orientation reduces corruption to individual deviance, obscuring its systemic character and reinforcing its normalisation. Zemiology expands the analytical terrain but lacks a consistent normative foundation to explain how corruption is defined, negotiated, and contested within broader relations of power. Addressing these limitations, the study study draws on lived experience to reconceptualise corruption as a systemic and relational logic of social ordering, produced through hierarchical power relations that privilege dominant groups while exploiting, misrecognizing, and commodifying subordinate and marginalised populations—processes that constitute the very logic of corruption as the distortion and degradation of social relations and human well-being.

The concept of systemic corruption is therefore deployed to reveal how practices initiated and structured by institutional elites are continuously reproduced through the compliance, tolerance, and participation of lower-ranking members, while simultaneously securing wider social consent through processes of normalisation. In this sense, corruption endures not only as an institutional practice but also as part of a hegemonic social order. To capture the complexity of these dynamics, the study integrates four theoretical tools—hegemonic masculinity, differential association, strain theory, and techniques of neutralisation—to account for both the structural conditions and the individual-level responses to corruption, while demonstrating how such dynamics reproduce and entrench configurations of power across intersecting dimensions of class, gender, and race.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):