Description
Trust has emerged as a promising literature within International Relations, and there is an ever-growing body of works that discuss trust’s formation between different actors. While this emergent trust has been transformative in a number of cases, less clear is how trust can contribute to the maintenance of stable structures if it is held by individuals. Such criticisms are especially pertinent for security communities, where trust has been recognised as a constituting and stabilising factor, without a persuasive treatment of how this is achieved over time. As something that is increasingly recognised as being individually-held, then, the question remains how can long-term trusting relationships be maintained in a context of alternating individuals that may not have the opportunity (or desire) to invest in interpersonal relationships? This paper argues the practice turn – and specifically communities of practice - holds key insights for explaining how trust proliferates from specific relationships to become embedded within security communities through the idea of ‘trusting’. Drawing upon the practice literatures from inside and outside of IR, I demonstrate that trusting can become a pattern of action. This trusting is performed in response to specific practices that have come to be understood as if they are indices of trustworthiness, which work to constitute a collectively held knowledge that the other can be trusted. In order to highlight this, I aim to show that trusting has interceded in crises that had the potential to undermine peace and cooperation within the ASEAN security community. Actors embodying specific roles within the community were capable of trusting (as well as ‘being’ trustworthy) absent of interpersonal trusting relationships.
