Description
What are perceptions of trustworthiness and trust? While trustworthiness and trust can be seen as individual or interpersonal-level phenomena emerging from social interactions, they also constitute norms that can be diffused between individuals and from individuals to organizations or even states. As such, how does this diffusion occur? This paper examines the role of entrepreneurial actors relevant to both trust and norm research – namely boundary-spanners, trust, and norm entrepreneurs – to consider how perceptions of trustworthiness and/or trust may operate as a norm, and how norm entrepreneurs operationalise them. To do so, the paper examines the process by which the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) came to be seen as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians – and thus negotiating partner with Israel – between 1988-1992, first by the United States (US) and then by the State of Israel and the role of individuals in establishing the PLO as a potentially trustworthy actor. As such, the paper examines these two related but separate case studies of US-PLO and Israeli-PLO dialogue. Yet these norms were defined and indeed contested by individuals and groups within both governments who continued to hold to the existing and longstanding norm that there was “no one to talk to, nothing to talk about” when it came to the Palestinians, and by extension, the PLO.
