Building trust among enemies: The central challenge for international conflict resolution

Abstract

The article presents an approach to the gradual building of trust among enemies, who—even when they have an interest in making peace—are afraid to extend trust to each other lest it jeopardize their own existence. Efforts to resolve the conflict, therefore, confront a basic dilemma: Parties cannot enter into a peace process without some degree of mutual trust, but they cannot build trust without entering into a peace process. The article discusses the ways in which interactive problem solving—a form of unofficial diplomacy, which the author has applied most extensively to the Israeli–Palestinian case—attempts to deal with this dilemma. It describes five concepts that have proven useful to confronting this dilemma in problem-solving workshops with politically influential Israelis and Palestinians and that should also be relevant to trust building in the larger peace process: the view of movement toward peace as a process of successive approximations, in which the level of commitment gradually increases with the level of reassurance; the role of the third party as a repository of trust, particularly in the early stages of the process; the focus on “working trust” in the other's seriousness about peace based on their own interests (rather than interpersonal trust based on good will); the view of the relationship between participants in the peace process as an uneasy coalition; and the development of a systematic process of mutual reassurance, based on responsiveness and reciprocity.