Description
Since Brexit, the UK’s credibility as a reliable and trustworthy international partner has increasingly come under question as a result of their repeated attempts to renegotiate or avoid complying with various aspects of the Brexit deals agreed with the EU, particularly as they pertain to relations between the UK, EU, and Northern Ireland.
Less consideration, however, has been given to the impact of Brexit on trust at the level of the everyday between the UK government and individuals and social groups. Drawing on interviews with UK, Irish, and EEA nationals living in Northern Ireland, this article engages in a critical reappraisal of Anthony Giddens’ original conceptualisation of basic trust in ontological security studies. Specifically, by engaging with interlocuters who have different forms of citizenship-relation with the UK (British/Irish/Both/EU), this paper seeks to better understand the ways in which a singular event (Brexit) engenders different disruptions to basic trust and to ontological security more broadly, and the implications of this for social cohesion.
