Description
This paper examines how professionals who work in the United Nations peace operations bureaucracy understand and enact trust. Trust is often implicitly assumed as synonymous with the outputs of peace operations (Rice et al., 2021), yet there is a dearth of academic research which examines how trust is built, maintained, and lost between those who undertake peacekeeping on behalf of international organisations. Similarly, in the UN’s ‘New Agenda for Peace’ (2023), trust between people, their governments and the UN is highlighted as fundamental to international peace and security. However, despite existing research from other fields on the impact of internal relations on organisational functioning (c.f. Nienaber et al., 2019; Wo, 2019), there is limited reflection on how trust within the UN might impact on how trust is operationalised in international peace and conflict resolution. Using empirical data from interviews with staff, the paper identifies four key bases of trust that inform how these professionals build, manage and maintain interpersonal and inter-agency trust relationships. It explores both formal and informal mechanisms of trust building, maintenance and repair, as well as identifying what interpersonal and structural factors lead to trust breaking down.
