Are the Roads to Trust Mutually Exclusive?

Abstract

Building Trust: Overcoming Suspicion in International Conflict. By Aaron Hoffman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 218 pp., $55.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7914-6635-3), $19.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7914-6636-1). How conflicting parties can overcome their deep suspicions and replace them with trusting relations is a question that has occupied scholars from various disciplines for a long time. The intricacies of trust have been explored by scholars in social psychology, organizational studies, economics, conflict resolution, and political science. One literature in which trust figures very prominently, especially in the context of negotiations, is the literature on game and decision theory. However, even within this literature, it is not common to see studies that focus on the building of trust as a process or that treat the formation of trusting relations as a dependent variable (for an exception to this generalization, see Deutsch and Krauss 1962). Process-oriented studies on how to build interpersonal trust are more common in social psychology and the negotiation literature (see, for example, Lewicki and Wiethoff 2000). Process-oriented approaches to trust have also been uncommon in the international relations literature. A number of prominent international relations theories do deal with how cooperation develops among states (see, for example, Axelrod 1984; Keohane 1984). However, these theories do not necessarily scrutinize trust as a separate variable or distinguish between “cooperation with trust” and “cooperation without trust.” Moreover, even when trust has been treated as a distinct variable in international relations, it has usually been treated as an independent variable, influencing such things as collective identity formation (for example, Wendt 1999), peaceful relations and change (for example, Adler and Barnett 1998), or international regime formation (for example, Keohane 1983). In this context, Aaron Hoffman's Building Trust: Overcoming Suspicion in International Conflict is an important addition to the international relations literature because it (1) treats trust as a dependent variable, (2) focuses on the process of building trust, and (3) clearly distinguishes between “cooperation with trust” and “cooperation without …