Description
This paper explores the concept of trust as it plays out in international friendship. Intuitively, this may appear redundant, as trust is intrinsic to and, perhaps, the key feature of friendship. It is assumed to just ‘be there’ and expressed in practices such as the sharing of private information/secrets and in the expectation that friends will support each other in times of need. Yet precisely because trust is so central, and because ‘international friendship’ is not a straightforward phenomenon, we need to have a conceptual grasp on its meaning. This paper approaches this task in three steps: (i) reviewing different ways ‘trust’ can be conceptualised in general, (ii) developing a reading that is intertwined with the chosen ontology of ‘international friendship’, and (iii) clarifying its place in the logic explaining the formation and decline of such friendship. The aim of this contribution is to offer a nuanced reading of trust as having a cognitive, affective and normative layer that, ultimately, is anchored in time. It supports this with illustrations of how such trust plays out in international politics.
