Trust and Cooperation in International Peacekeeping: Approaches to Assessing Trust in a High-Risk Networked Environment
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Singleton, Sara Elizabeth, Trust and Cooperation in International Peacekeeping: Approaches to Assessing Trust in a High-Risk Networked Environment, Trinity College Dublin.School of Social Sciences & Philosophy, 2021Download Item:
Abstract:
Trust has been described as an essential social lubricant (Luhmann, 1979) and one of the most important synthetic forces within society (Simmel, 1950). Trust acts as a reducer of social complexity and is often viewed as a substitute for explicit contracts as a way of coping with uncertainty (Bachmann, 2001).
International peacekeeping provides a unique social environment to study trust due to exceptional levels of cultural and organizational diversity, heightened risk, and the complex power dynamics between actors. This social system will include organizations and groups with their own distinct hierarchies, mandates, and priorities: international military, police and civilian staff, and local institutions and communities. In order for peacekeeping to be successful these diverse groups must come together rapidly and act as one unified and highly efficient networked organization. Peacekeeping missions take place in low-trust societies that are experiencing conflict or its aftereffects, conditions that lend themselves to institutional degradation, corruption, and the erosion of societal trust on multiple levels.
This research investigated questions on the trust dynamics of international peacekeeping missions: how different categories of peacekeepers trust, behaviors that facilitate and hinder the development and maintenance of trust between peacekeeping personnel (and between international peacekeepers and local communities), the role trust has in the mobilization of social capital within peacekeeping networks, and finally methodologically, how best to study trust dynamics in this particular context. Trust is widely recognized as socially constructed and context dependent and yet a large amount of the extant trust research remains generalized and theoretical. I wanted to ensure my research was of practical use and accessible to peacekeeping practitioners. For this reason, I chose to arrange my thesis in the format of a series of papers targeted to journals in the field. These papers constitute the four empirical chapters (Chapters 2-5).
My doctoral research was under the auspices of the Horizon 2020 Gaming for Peace/GAP project. The GAP project was designed in response to a gap in soft-skills training for peacekeeping personnel and embedded a base curriculum of these skills in a scenario-based role-playing computer game. My thesis uses a subset of 144 in-depth semi-structured interviews with military, police and civilian personnel from six EU countries: Ireland, Northern Ireland, Finland, Portugal, Poland, and Bulgaria. These interviews were collected by a team of researchers from institutions across partner countries. As part of this team of researchers I collected and transcribed 17 of these interviews. The interview schedule contained questions on cooperation, communication, gender awareness, cultural awareness, risk management, and questions that I designed on trust. The same methodological package was used across countries to ensure consistency and allowed data to be pooled and compared.
Trust is challenging in terms of study owing to it being a multidimensional and ambiguous concept that has established discrepancies between belief and action. For this reason, I chose a mixed methods design with the aim of understanding trust through a variety of methods, and their combination. I first analyzed interviews thematically and two qualitative papers were informed by this analysis. This first paper (Chapter 2) uses a subset of interviews with military peacekeepers and develops a typology for trust in peacekeeping that was used iteratively for coding. This chapter goes on to outline the soft skill of trust awareness - awareness of the role of trust and how to engender it, and trust mechanics - practical actions and behaviors that foster trust. The second paper (Chapter 3) examines the trust-based interactions of police personnel and how they contribute to the functioning of peacekeeping networks. This chapter uses Nan Lin s (2008) distinction between accessed social capital, the resources and social ties present in a network and mobilized social capital, the actual use of social ties, faciliatated by trust, and whether this mobilizes the resources present.
A second phase of coding utilized techniques borrowed from the Critical Incident Technique (Flanagan, 1954) to embed trust concepts and scenarios in vignette experiments. The third paper (Chapter 4) uses data from 108 vignette experiments with international peacekeepers and tests different theories about what promotes or reduces trust in peacekeeping, noting differences across subgroups by institutional category, gender, and national groupings. The final paper (Chapter 5) details the process of developing trust vignettes. This chapter uses the complementary body of data generated through the development and analysis of vignette experiments to explore inconsistencies and contradictions between qualitative and quantitative sources and discusses how the mixing of methods allows us to better understand trust dynamics in peacekeeping.
This thesis is framed by an integrative introductory chapter (Chapter 1) and concluding chapter (Chapter 6) that draws these findings chapters together and outlines the empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions of the thesis.
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European Commission
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https://tcdlocalportal.tcd.ie/pls/EnterApex/f?p=800:71:0::::P71_USERNAME:SINGLETSDescription:
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Author: Singleton, Sara Elizabeth
Advisor:
Holohan, AnneLayte, Richard
Publisher:
Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of SociologyType of material:
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Full text availableKeywords:
Networks, Trust, Peacekeeping, Mixed MethodsMetadata
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