From Repression to Restoration? Police and Civil Society Roles in Agrarian Restorative Justice in Central Kalimantan

Abstract

47 agrarian disputes were recorded in Kotawaringin Timur alone between 2020–2024, yet the district police responded not with arrests, but with Huma Hapakat (House of Agreement), a culturally grounded dialogue mechanism a response that inverts the historically repressive role attributed to Indonesian security forces in land conflicts. While existing literature documents police mediation in urban settings, their role as institutional mediators in structural agrarian disputes involving corporate actors and indigenous communities remains empirically unexamined. This study addresses that gap by examining how POLRI and civil society organizations operationalize restorative justice in oil palm plasma disputes in Kotawaringin Timur District, Central Kalimantan. Using Moustakas's transcendental phenomenology, this study draws on in-depth interviews with police officers, civil society representatives, and affected community members in Kecamatan Cempaga and Kota Besi. Findings reveal that POLRI has developed Huma Hapakat, a culturally adapted restorative mechanism integrating Dayak deliberative traditions with a graduated green-yellow-red intervention zone system. Yet its effectiveness is fundamentally undermined by a single critical asymmetry: while community members and police officers engaged consistently, the company the party whose compliance is essential repeatedly absented itself from mediation forums without consequence. Village cooperative representatives further reported that sustained advocacy over multiple years had eroded member commitment, and that targeted payments to individual members had fractured internal solidarity a dynamic that exposes how restorative processes can be systematically hollowed out by the more powerful party. The study concludes that restorative justice in agrarian contexts requires not only cultural legitimacy but also coercive institutional backing proposing "embedded restoration," in which restorative processes are anchored within enforceable regulatory frameworks such as conditioning concession renewal on demonstrated mediation compliance as a theoretical response to this paradox.