Policing a Resilient Social Practice: Anti-Corruption, Datafication and Its Limits

Building on insights from critical governance studies, theories on modern policing and studies of big data analytics, amongst others, this paper explores how corporations and state actors have begun to organize around anti-corruption in novel ways, deploying new media technologies and modes of policing. It develops the concept of hybrid policing, which captures changes in the organization, temporality and knowledge foundations of modern policing of corruption. It provides two illustrations. In the first, the policing of corruption is primarily driven by corporations, as exemplified by the Maritime Anti-Corruption Network (MACN) and its activities in so-called ‘hot spot’ regions. In the second illustration, the policing of corruption is driven by government and subsumed under a larger project of societal reengineering, as exemplified by the emerging Chinese Social Credit System. In both cases, the policing of corruption elicits strong aspirations of prediction and foresight, with implications for how ‘corrupt’ actors are constructed and anti-corruption interventions designed. Finally, the paper considers why hybrid policing of corruption does not imply a simple shift from public toward private authority, but rather entails a growing focus on pre-crime interventions, proactiveness and prediction, with corporations emphasizing attempts at forestalling corruption based on new data technologies and state actors retaining the post-crime aspects of corruption control while scaling up on anticipatory and preventive efforts as well.