Description
While trust research within International Studies emerged at a time of significant global change - the end of the Cold War - and sought to understand how trust helped understand change, the current generation of scholars have rapidly expanded this previously narrow agenda into a much broader unpacking and exploration of trust at the international level. In doing so they have drawn on new thinking both within and outside of the discipline to better understand the present and the future as well as the past. This panel draws together a number of papers exploring the concept of trust across a variety of different levels of analysis, from the individual, to the interpersonal, the interstate and the systemic. In doing so, the papers seek to understand how trust operates in a variety of contexts from the role of dispositions shaping individuals, state leaders managing adversarial relations, UN and EU diplomats working in the multilateral space, to challenges raised by disinformation on public perceptions. Overall, the panel demonstrates that there is much more to understand regarding the concept of trust and that new directions for research can aid scholars and practitioners in navigating challenges and opportunities in an ever changing global context.
