Relational trust in international cooperation: The case of North–South trade negotiations (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Conceptualization of Trust in International Relations
European Journal of International Relations, 2002
This article provides a conceptualization of trust in interstate relations in terms amenable to research. In the field of International Relations trust is often equated with the willingness to take risks on the behavior of others. However, this approach is problematic because it does not provide a basis for distinguishing between trusting and non-trusting relationships. In contrast, I propose that trust implies a willingness to take risks on the behavior of others based on the belief that potential trustees will `do what is right'. Recognizing that trust involves particular beliefs about the motivations of others distinguishes it from the broader category of risk and enables trusting relationships to be identified more precisely. After elaborating my definitional approach, I discuss indicators designed to gauge the presence of trusting interstate relations in empirical settings.
Trust and Missed Opportunities in International Relations
Political Psychology, 1997
With the end of the Cold War, we must wonder whether there were missed opportunities to regulate the arms race and global competition, which nearly bankrupted the United States and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A missed opportunity for agreement is a situation where there was at least one alternative that the parties to a conflict preferred or would have preferred to nonagreement. Hard-core Realists argue that states compete for territory, arms, and influence because they have conflicting national interests. Soft-core Realists maintain that such conflicts are effects of international anarchy and uncertainty, and that states can cooperate contingent on reciprocity. I argue that states often fail to cooperate even when they have compatible preferences because policy-makers make incorrect inferences about the opponent's motives and intentions, a process that can be illuminated by social psychology. I present three alternative explanations of trust and distrust in international relations-rational choice, domestic structures, and social psychology. If policy-makers are prudent, they will assess the other's interests in observing an agreement as well as its reputation. Often, domestic political structures encourage leaders to promote distrust of an external enemy to legitimize their internal rule or foreign policy. Finally, distrust may lead policy-makers to dismiss the other side's cooperative signals or proposals. Distrust can be overcome by making a series of step-by-step agreements in which each side can test the other's good faith at limited cost, or through unilateral concessions as part of a consistent policy.
How to study trust in international relations
Long neglected as a focus of serious study in International Relations (IR), the concept of trust has recently begun to attract increasing attention. Unfortunately, much of this exciting new work still suffers from a lack of a comprehensive conceptualization of trust and a rigorous and replicable operationalization of this conceptualization. In this paper, I help address this problem by proposing a new definition and conceptualization of trust appropriate to IR founded on research in psychology, economics, and even neurology. This conceptualization holds that trust is the result of a collective identification that occurs when sufficient levels of positive affect and familiarity between agents react and crystallize around a salient commonality. Building on this conceptualization, I identify a number of operationalizable factors capable of generating the familiarity and positive affect required for trust to eventuate and derive some qualitative and quantitative indicators for their measurement. Simultaneously, I tackle to problem of how trust, which can only exist at the level of the individual, comes to influence the behaviour of states. I close the paper by distilling this analysis into a five-step research procedure which can be used as a template for studying trust and its influence on state decision-making in IR.
Trust and Mistrust in International Relations
Perspectives on Politics, 2006
Andrew Kidd has written an impressive book dealing with trust between states: what it is, how it is established and maintained, and why it is significant. He shows how trust relates to general theories of international relations and also illustrates its operation in European international relations during the cold war. This book is both important and relevant reading for students of political psychology, because it employs a psychological construct (trust) within the context of rational choice theory to analyze world politics.
Trust-Building in International Relations*
2010
The challenge of building trust between states that have a history of conflict and acrimony has attracted the attention of scholars in the field of International Relations for several decades. While several models have been offered, constant changes in the international environment reveal their gaps. In this paper, the author explores the challenges that states face in the process of building trusting relationships, given the complexity nuclearization proffers. It presents a critique of the existing models and some preliminary ideas for understanding the process of trust building using a concept he terms as “interpersonal communicative dynamics”.
Applying a trust lens to the study of international strategic alliance negotiations
European Journal of International Management, 2019
This paper considers the value of applying a trust lens to the study of international strategic alliance negotiations. This paper considers that, in the context of international strategic alliances, negotiation is not limited to the process of reaching an initial agreement, but also includes the implementation and joint value creation phases. In a context where neither party has the power to enforce values on the other, the process of negotiating values and managing expectations brings the structures of the working relationship into sharp focus illuminating the ongoing process whereby agreed or accepted behavioural values emerge and begin to underpin the collaborative endeavour. Following a brief cultural diversion to show how the trust lens can illuminate the development of alliance culture, the paper provides an overview of key recent literature on the conception of trust and trust development before returning to a discussion of trust and negotiation and especially of the strategic alliances.
The everyday concept of trust in international cooperation environments
Far from agreement, the uneven definitions of trust indicate the difficulty in encapsulating this psychological state in a single and precise idea. Uncovering the everyday concept of trust can show the need for a different approach to its definition. To this aim, 16 expatriates of several international cooperation organizations around the world gave their views through an electronic Delphi process declaring they do not associate trust with risk or vulnerability, which does not correspond with the more widespread definition of trust in work and organizational psychology. Instead, trust appears as an evaluation that ensures outcomes as well as an understanding of them. A cluster of several central ideas in the everyday concept highlights that different practices can be designed to build or recover trust in different scenarios.
Africa Review, 2020
The word trust is oftentimes used by leaders in the Forum on China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), and as the literature points out mainly to foster conditions for cooperation and mutual understanding. Studies in International Relations (IR), reveal that trust is an important tool to manage social behaviour in multilateral organizations by way of past and current interactions, learning and sharing and encapsulating common interests. Group meetings in the forum is the main form of interaction and ultimately aim to advance the collective interest, however, interpersonal contacts between leaders and officials also contribute to a common set of objectives. Trust is also an attribute in the establishment of Sino-African strategic partnerships that have increased in recent years. The argument is that concepts of trust in IR can provide answers to the following research question. What are the characteristics of trust-building in the forum and does it facilitate and enhance cooperation and understanding? This question is addressed along three main themes. China’s role as initiator of trust building, the managing of relations between the members and a socio-psychological approach to create trust. An important finding is that interaction creates conditions for acquiring information about the interests of other members and the expected outcomes they want to achieve. In return, when members believe in the benefits of cooperation, they will behave in a trustworthy manner to build better relationships.
Generalized Social Trust and International Dispute Settlement
International Interactions, 2016
What determines the success of a peaceful settlement attempt of a border dispute? In order to fully understand why decision makers choose to put an end to an ongoing conflict, it is necessary to consider the social trust levels of the general populations in both states. International conflict settlement requires public support at the domestic level. If a state's general population perceives the potential dangers of a settlement as too severe, the conclusion of a peace agreement will be difficult. We argue that high levels of social trust allow citizens (1) to favor more conciliatory foreign policies and (2) to be more optimistic about the future behavior of other states. In democratic settings, these public attitudes serve as powerful constraints for decision makers. As a result, high aggregate levels of social trust should be directly related to concession-granting behavior by democracies as well as effective dispute settlement among jointly democratic dyads. We test these expectations with a new aggregate-level measure of social trust and find mixed support for our hypotheses: While trust does not influence the behavior of challenger states, it does have strong effects on democratic target states and jointly democratic dyads.
Trust in world politics: converting ‘identity’ into a source of security through trust-learning
Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2014
In the discipline of international relations, the concept of trust has been theorised in two ways: the ‘rationalist’ approach and the ‘normative’ approach. This article aims to show that these approaches do not adequately reflect how trust operates in world politics and that trust provides a new way of understanding the identity–security nexus in international relations. It is argued that as actors learn to trust each other, this trust-learning process has a transformative effect on their definition of self-interests and identities. The elaborated understanding of trust in the security dilemma is operationalised in terms of the immigration security dilemma.