Trust and social movements: A new research agenda

Abstract

Social movement studies clearly suggest that trust matters for processes of social mobilization: When engaging in costly, and potentially risky, contentious collective action on a common goal, activists and groups rely on the expectation that fellow protestors and allies will not fail them. To date, however, we lack research that explains which types of trust shape the emergence and evolution of social movements. Trust, we argue, is not simply an independent variable influencing mobilization, but is itself shaped—built, stabilized, weakened, or even destroyed—over the course of collective contentious action. To set the stage for a corresponding research agenda, this introduction to the special issue “Trust and Social Movements” bridges the gap between research on trust and social movement studies and clarifies the complex conceptual relationship between various types of trust and the dynamics of social mobilization. Furthermore, we identify overarching research questions, summarize the contributions to the special issue, and discuss key findings.

Introduction

The past decade has been marked by worldwide mass protests, driven by various socioeconomic and political grievances. Participation in the corresponding social movements included actors from diverse backgrounds ranging from gender, socioeconomic, ethnic, religious, ideological, generational, and political backgrounds. Strategic alliances and coalitions have been formed across social and political conflict lines (Carothers and Youngs, 2015). Scholarly work analyzing these various types of contentious actions has relied heavily on social movement theories to understand these new dynamics of contentious activities. ¹ So far, however, one important aspect of mobilization has been largely neglected, both in more recent empirical studies and in social movement theories in general: the role of trust. This special issue demonstrates that trust is an essential factor shaping social movements, in particular when it comes to understanding how and why mass protests emerge and are able to evolve into broader and sustained social movements. In this introductory essay, we put forward a research agenda that aims at tackling this gap in social movement studies. To do so, we propose to bring together the hitherto largely separated research on social movements and trust into a fruitful mutual exchange.

The starting point of our considerations is the assumption that contentious action by heterogeneous protest groups requires a minimum level of social trust, defined as “the expectation that others will contribute to the well-being of a person or a group, or at least will refrain from harmful actions” (Freitag and Traunmüller, 2009: 782, following Offe, 1999). Social movement scholars have for a long time emphasized the importance of a particular form of trust for participation in protests and the emergence of social movements, namely trust based on pre-existing social ties and networks (for an overview of the debate, see Walgrave and Ketelaars, 2019: 303). During mass protests and within social movements, however, social interaction goes well beyond persons who know each other. Personal, or particularized trust between familiar people might therefore be an important starting point for mobilization, but it is not enough to enable broader and more sustained processes of mobilization. To date, we know surprisingly little about the causes and dynamics of trust building during processes of mobilization. The same applies to the consequences of trust: To what extent do different forms and intensities of trust within social movements help explain patterns and outcomes of mobilization?

Theories of sociology have long contended that modern societies generally need trust to reduce social complexities and enable cooperation (Luhmann, 2017). The other side of the coin is that granting trust always entails certain degrees of uncertainty, dependence, and vulnerability on the part of the trustor (Rousseau et al., 1998). If this is true in general, collective contentious action entails particular risks, which can at times be even existential (Pfeifer and Weipert-Fenner, 2022). Joint activism is built on the expectation that fellow protesters and allies will honor agreements and not betray the overall mission of their fellow protestors. The more sophisticated and resource-demanding cooperation becomes—in forms of alliances and coalitions, for instance—the higher the risk of being instrumentalized by other individuals, partner organizations, or allied social movements and, hence, the more trust is arguably needed to sustain collective action. Particularly when mobilization takes place in high-risk contexts, such as in authoritarian regimes, activists need to trust that fellow protesters will not betray joint commitments, for instance, by not showing up at planned public event or by turning out to be a regime thug or spy.

These examples highlight how important trust is not only for the emergence of social movements but also for sustaining and broadening them. In this sense, trust is an explanatory variable for mobilization. At the same time, it is the experience of protesting together that help build trust between parties. Social movement research suggests that the longer the mobilization lasts, the deeper and wider social ties between protesters will become (Bishara, 2021). This can translate into trust which, then, makes trust also a consequence of collective action. Still, how trust is built, maintained, enhanced, but also eventually diminished or lost in mobilization, has not been systematically studied so far (Rousseau et al., 1998).

Based on these observations and arguments, this special issue sets out to systematically analyze the causes and dynamics of trust building during episodes of contention as well as the influence of trust on social movements. We address these questions—on the why and how as well as the consequences of trust—through bridging the gap between trust research and social movement studies, integrating their respective insights, concepts, and theories to further our understanding of the broader dynamics of social mobilization and contentious action. This is particularly fruitful as both research fields focus on social relations, which facilitates their integration. In the next section, we bring together existing research from these two fields of study to identify research gaps and develop a broader research agenda, for the contributions in this special issue and beyond. The overall goal is to show that when systematically combined, the literatures on social movements and trust enable innovative research on, and promise important new insights into, protest cycles, social movement participation, networking, and the rise and fall of social movements.

Trust and social movements: the state of research

Existing research on trust differentiates between political and social trust. The former refers to vertical trust of citizens or social groups in political institutions, the latter to horizontal trust between individuals or social groups. Horizontal trust is further differentiated into particularized or personal trust, that is, trust in people one knows, and generalized social trust, that is, trust in strangers (Delhey et al., 2011; Offe, 1999). For generalized social trust, an additional distinction is between trust in members of one’s own social group (ingroup trust) and trust that cuts across existing societal cleavages (outgroup trust) (Kramer, 2018). Drawing on Putnam’s social capital theory, ingroup trust is also called “bonding,” outgroup trust “bridging” (Putnam, 2000).

Trust research has investigated the interconnections between the different trust types for several decades now, revealing competing models (Newton and Zmerli, 2011). One model consists of mutually reinforcing relations, mostly in a positive sense, as explained by social capital theory as a kind of upward spiral between political and social trust and democracy. From this perspective, dense social networks and trustworthy institutions promote trust between citizens as they obey the laws and rules; here, it is state institutions that effectively monitor norm compliance and, thereby, pave the way for social as well as political trust (Levi, 1998). A corresponding correlation was observed in a large number of democratic regimes (Herreros and Criado, 2008; Levi, 1998). The opposite, downward spiral of political and social trust was rather found outside wealthy, established democracies, and economically developed European countries, for instance, in post-soviet countries (Badescu and Uslaner, 2003) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) (Alijla, 2020). A second, competing model regards trust relations as a zero-sum game: Here, high levels of particularized trust are seen as reinforcing the division between ingroup and outgroup trust as well as contributing to low trust in political institutions and actors (e.g. Uslaner, 1999; Yamagishi and Yamagishi, 1994). This perspective, in recent years, has largely been replaced by a third option that takes elements of the first one, but problematizes much more strongly the conditions under which specific forms of trust mutually shape each other, with a view to political, economic, social, and cultural variables, including the quality of institutions and degrees of inequality (for an overview, see Newton and Zmerli, 2011: 176–177).

While trust research thrives on the search for interconnections between different types of trust as outlined above, existing studies on trust and social movements tend to focus on one trust type to, then, study its effect on mobilization. When it comes to political trust, research in Europe has shown that people with low levels of political trust are more likely to participate in contentious collective actions (Braun and Hutter, 2016; Hooghe and Marien, 2013; Neumayer et al., 2023). Instead, in Latin America, trust in political institutions has been associated with stronger feelings of attachment to the political system and a perception of protest efficacy (Somma et al., 2020). For other world regions and autocracies in particular, we know much less about the relation between political trust and activism, but existing research suggests a similar logic. For the MENA region, for instance, Sika shows that low political trust correlates with higher protest participation (2020, for an overview of the debate, see 1517–1518). Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans (2018), however, suggest a more nuanced picture. In protests in Europe, they find both trusting and distrusting protesters, whose motives are different: While the former go to the streets to push institutional politics, in whose problem-solving capacities they still place their trust, the latter see street activism as a substitute for untrustworthy political institutions.

With a view to the impact of (the various forms of) social trust on mobilization, research suggests a positive relation. First, pre-existing personal or particularized trust, which can range from closed trust networks to more or less tight social ties between friends and relatives (e.g. Della Porta, 1988; Tilly, 2005), is seen as highly conducive for mobilization (in different ways, see Walgrave and Ketelaars, 2019). This becomes increasingly important as participation becomes riskier. Second, high levels of generalized trust also seem to make contentious collective actions more likely as trusting people feel reassured that others will also participate in contentious events (Benson and Rochon, 2004). However, there are also studies pointing to the need for more fine-grained analysis that differentiate between the various forms of social trust: between ingroup and outgroup trust (Crepaz et al., 2017), or between different levels of aggregation (individual-level vs contextual-level, Glaeser, 2016), and along different outcomes to be observed: for example, distinguishing between the intention to participate and actual participation (Glaeser, 2016). Lewis (2021) recently suggested to look more closely at the specific form of mobilization that social trust would foster, in his case, the increased probability of non-violent civil resistance.

From the perspective of social movement scholarship, a very important element of the dynamics of contentious action are networks, coalitions, and alliances (Diani and McAdam, 2003; Van Dyke and McCammon, 2010; Zajak and Haunss, 2022). These modes of coordination go well beyond closed trust networks as they entail larger sets of social relations, but at the same time are more particular as to necessarily require generalized trust. Also, they can involve different configurations of ingroup and outgroup trust relations. An example is social movement organizations that cooperate with varying degrees of formalized collaboration. Trust obviously is involved here. Yet, as Goodwin et al. (2004: 419) stated 20 years ago, we know surprisingly little about trust dynamics in such contexts. This contribution is an attempt to address the dynamics of trust in different contexts. Contributions to this special issue show, for instance, that different types of trust matter. Nevertheless, they do not necessarily fit neatly in established typologies. First, trust in social movement leaders proves important, but combines features of both political trust (trust in an authority) and social trust (trust in someone one knows, who is member of an ingroup). Second, for organizations joining in coalitions and, even more so, in overarching social movements, trust between organizations becomes crucial, but such organizational trust sits somewhere between particularized, ingroup, or bonding trust and generalized, outgroup, or bridging trust (Piper et al., 2023). Another contribution to this special issue shows that the trust that is needed for movements and networks differs across varying political and social contexts (Diani, 2023).

Regarding the latter point, it is important to emphasize that we generally know less about trust in contexts outside Europe and the United States, be these autocracies or fragile democracies, as most commonly found in the global South (Rivetti and Cavatorta, 2017; Suh and Reynolds-Stenson, 2018; Wolff, 2023). What we know so far points strongly toward path dependencies of trust relations in protest events and their aftermath (Hassan et al., 2020; Sika, 2020). We are also cautioned not to have a positive bias toward the role of civil society actors for instance in highly divided societies (Vértes et al., 2021); this mirrors earlier criticism of Putnam’s view on civic associations as creating social capital that does not factor in the role of social capital (and, likewise, trust) in enabling violent conflict and perpetuating existing cleavages (see, e.g. Siisiäinen, 2003). What we need is, thus, global, comparative research on trust dynamics in social movements that cover different regime types and societies with different trust levels. Such a comparative approach that studies social movements from a relational and interactive perspective will also enrich trust research by bringing to the fore new trust dynamics as we spell out below.

As mentioned before, trust is mostly treated as an independent variable explaining certain outcomes in regard to mobilization. While acknowledging the importance of a research focus on the role and consequences of trust for social movements, we argue here that we also need to turn the perspective and look at how contentious action as well as state responses to it shape trust relations. Evidence on these effects on trust and the respective mechanisms remains scattered. Early on, Mario Diani (2003) argued that trust can become multiplied in episodes of contentious collective action. Intense on-site experiences of protesting can enhance social bonds (Della Porta et al., 2013) and “co-presence at events” arguably is at least as important in creating movement ties as co-membership (Diani and Mische, 2015). There are also good reasons and some evidence to believe that democratic or participatory practices as well as accountability mechanisms within movements help build trusting relations (Herreros and Criado, 2003). However, the precise implications for trust—also in terms of trust as a long-term “affective emotion” (Goodwin et al., 2004: 419)—still needs further analysis. This is particularly so as mobilization can last over longer periods and relations between activists can be shaped over several cycles of contention.

In addition to trust building as a side-effect of mobilization dynamics, social relations are also shaped by deliberate attempts to actively create or destroy trust. One fundamental idea of social movements is, in Helena Flam’s (2005: 25) words, “to shake people out of their routine trust in the authorities and out of their everyday assumption that authorities work towards the public good and therefore deserve their loyalty.” How activists try to shrink political trust and when they are successful in doing so has not been systematically studied. The same applies to the question of how activists and organizations deliberately try to build trust inside movements. But also external actors, and most notably governments, regimes, or ruling elites, participate in the “trust game.” This is most obvious in the case of authoritarian regimes that try to weaken social movements they perceive as threatening by seeking to destroy trust between activists and/or citizen trust in these movements. For instance, Deng and O’Brien (2013) show how Chinese cadres try to destroy trust relations of activists by targeted repression against the activists’ closest social ties—and thereby weakening the most important trust pillar of mobilization, particularly in high-risk contexts. As Sika (2023) and Ho (2023) demonstrate in their contributions to this special issue, there are various ways in which ruling elites try to destroy trust in as well as inside social movements.

As has become clear, the effects of mobilization on trust as well as the overall dynamics of trust building within social movements have been studied much less than the effects of trust on movements. To combine both perspectives, in the following section, we propose a research agenda that systematically integrates trust and social movement relations into one analytical framework.

Research agenda and contributions

The starting observation of our endeavor is that levels of general trust vary widely across world regions (Mattes and Moreno, 2018). We therefore assume that trust as a precondition of as well as an outcome of mobilization will also differ significantly. To systematically analyze the role of trust in processes of social mobilization, it is first important to sketch the types of trust that we expect to be relevant for social movements:

1. Vertical political trust, that is, the level of trust that members of social movements have in specific political institutions or in their political regime more broadly, is an important context condition that can be expected to shape activists’ motivation but that is simultaneously shaped by the framing efforts of movement “entrepreneurs”;

2. Horizontal intra-movement trust, that is, the level of trust between individual and collective members of social movements and broader protest networks. Depending on the composition of the social movement, this horizontal type of trust can come in different shapes:

3. ● Particularized or ingroup trust in specific segments, subnetworks or organizations within a given movement or coalition;

4. ● Generalized or outgroup trust, that is, trust that unites activists and groups across identity lines or cleavages that may pervade a given movement or coalition.

To analyze this set of trust relations as it plays out in social movements, we suggest to adopt a relational perspective on social mobilization (e.g. Diani and McAdam, 2003). The latter turns our attention to the emergence, growth, decline, and loss of trust between a complex set of actors over time. To gain a comprehensive view on trust dynamics during protest events or episodes, it is important to reconstruct micro-level interactions between individuals and groups, including their relations with state actors (Jasper, 2010). A key question, here, refers to the perceptions of opportunities and threats and, very importantly, emotions (Dornschneider, 2021; Goodwin et al., 2001; Rossi and Von Bülow, 2015). As generally the case in the study of contentious politics, “the state” also needs to be disaggregated to specifically assess potentially diverging relations of trust (and distrust) between various political actors, security forces, army, and the judiciary (Bishara, 2015; Grimm and Harders, 2018). The behavior of these external actors also potentially shapes the development (increases/decreases) of trust between protest actors. Finally, previous work on coalition-building in mass mobilization has pointed to the importance of peripheral actors within social movements who become brokers (Clarke, 2014; Diani, 2003; Robin and D’Cruz, 2019). Trust dynamics have rarely been analyzed in this perspective of social movement studies. Yet, as a number of contributions to this special issue show, trust constitutes a core issue in processes of brokerage and coalition building.

Through these differentiations, we aim to bring the role of trust to the forefront of social movement analysis. First, we argue that both vertical and horizontal trust relations matter during episodes of contention. In addition, the very experience of protesting together as well as the interaction with political institutions in the context of contentious politics shapes trust dynamics within different social movements, which are therefore very likely to change over time. Building on Della Porta et al. (2013) and Diani and Mische (2015), we hypothesize that the “generative power of protests” (Bishara, 2021) can lead to the creation of strong social bonds, a process that we can scrutinize more systematically if we understand it as the (re-)formation of trust relations. Therefore, the dynamics of trust and their role during episodes or cycles of contention need to be assessed systematically.

By systematically linking the social science scholarship on trust with social movement studies, we seek to establish and initiate a research agenda that brings the crucial role of trust to the forefront of social movement analysis. This agenda entails three sets of research questions pertaining to the dynamics of trust and trust building in social movements, the effects of trust on social movements, including their outcomes, as well as the impact of political context conditions (regime type) on both the dynamics and the role of trust. We specifically ask the following three sets of questions:

• How do the different types of trust evolve and interact during protest episodes? How do trust dynamics during protest episodes relate to pre-existing trust levels? How is trust built within social movements and coalitions?

• To what extent do trust dynamics cause, or contribute to, the rise and fall as well as the outcomes of social movements? How does trust building influence social movements’ organizational practices, framings, and repertoires of strategies?

• To what extent are the dynamics and consequences of trust shaped by context conditions and, in particular, by different political regimes?

In this special issue, we focus on the emergence, growth, preservation, and loss of horizontal, social trust within social movements and coalitions. Analytically, we chose this focus because we assume, as explained above, that trust between individuals and groups is a key resource in contentious action. Pragmatically, we decided to zoom in on social trust so as to allow for a more coherent set of articles that combine analytical depth with a broad, comparative reach. We therefore leave the close analysis of political trust to future research, yet do incorporate it at least partially as an important context variable.

The special issue brings together social movement scholars from different social science perspectives that use a common analytical framework to investigate the dynamics and role of trust in social movements and study how trust shapes, and is shaped by, processes of social mobilization. The contributions employ various methods and rely on different types of data. At the same time, the articles span different world regions and cover most different political regimes, thereby allowing for a broad, if exploratory, comparative view on the topic at hand. The special issue consists of two parts: The first one deals with the role of trust and the dynamics of trust building within movements; the second part comprises articles that study how responses by as well as the interaction with the state influences horizontal trust relations within movements.

The first part starts with Ming-sho Ho’s article on “Relational tactics and trust in high-risk activism: Anonymity, preexisting ties, and bonding in Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 protest” (Ho, 2023). Ho analyzes the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong to examine the various trust tactics that are undertaken by activists living under high risks of repression. He empirically zooms in on the mechanisms and problems that characterize processes of trust building as well as the strategies employed to deal with a lack of generalized social trust. He finds that small groups, based on prior and indirect friendship or acquaintanceship on the street actions, provide the necessary comradeship and division of labor to engage in high-risk protests. He argues that preexisting ties, anonymity, and bonding are the three commonly seen responses by activists when faced with high risks of repression. Social movement participants alternate their use of personal trust and generalized trust across various relational settings, finding ways to cope with distrust in strangers. His research contends that trust is more than a preexisting resource and can also be created during movement mobilization. Trust encourages protest participation, but it can also help in the provisioning of logistics, the sheltering, and the aftercare of activists. In response to these trust-building efforts, the regime has worked to undermine the trust networks that have been built during the 2019 pro-democracy contentious events, which refers to a key issue dealt with in the second part of the special issue (see below).

In “Democracy as a trust-building learning process: Organizational dilemmas in social movements,” Federico M. Rossi (2023) combines agonistic pluralism, social movement theory, and trust research to conceptualize the different ways in which social movements and coalitions deal with the organizational dilemma of how to define and act in the name of a shared goal without diluting the heterogeneity of self-identities and interests that compose a movement. Given that the groups and organizations that participate in a given movement or coalition face the perceived risk that they will be ignored in their unicity, trust becomes important. Analyzing four Argentine cases—the assembly movement of Buenos Aires, the coalition heading the largest continental campaign in the Americas against free trade agreements, the local branch of the transnational alter-globalization network ATTAC, and the main social movement organization of the unemployed workers’ movement—he shows that trust building can follow different paths, but is always a prerequisite for preserving intergroup heterogeneity to organize social movements in a democratic way.

“Trust is personal and professional: The role of trust in the rise and fall of a South African civil society coalition,” co-authored by Laurence Piper et al. (2023), explores trust dynamics in a coalition of civil society organizations in Cape Town, South Africa, called UniteBehind. Empirically tracing the rise and fall of this coalition, they show how a focus on trust helps explain this particular cycle of contention. More specifically, Piper et al. suggest that, during the rise of UniteBehind, personal trust in a particular movement leader combined with a specific form of particularized trust between organizations (“organizational trust”) facilitated cooperation between otherwise heterogeneous member organizations. Over time, however, the coalition was unable to sustain strategies of trust building. As individual organizations perceived increasing tensions between their respective agendas and interests and those of the coalition, organizational trust was undermined (while personal trust, which depended on the standing of one particular individual, also proved fragile). As a consequence, the attempt to transform UniteBehind into a social movement failed and the coalition dissolved.

Relatedly, Mario Diani’s (2023) article on “The relational preconditions of trust in collective action fields” analyzes trust-building mechanisms. He introduces and illustrates three different relational mechanisms of trust in collective action networks: embeddedness, familiarity, and brokerage. Trust can be assumed to be a precondition of inter-organizational alliances in a variety of organizational domains: The more demanding/costly/risky collective action is, the more we can assume it to be dependent on mechanisms of trust that increase the predictability of partners’ behavior. The article measures trust as a mediating factor, looking at how the mechanisms usually associated with trust also facilitate or discourage alliance building. In this vein, Diani looks at the structure of networks of civic organizations in different settings to see to what extent the mechanisms behind trust seem to shape alliance patterns, using the cases of networks of environmental groups in Milan in the 1980s, of organizations active on environmental, minorities and migrants, and social exclusion issues in Glasgow and Bristol in the 2000s, and organizations active on the urban environment in Cape Town in the 2010s.

The second set of articles analyzes the ways in which responses by and interactions with the state shape trust relations within movements under the conditions of different political regimes. Reversing the causal relationship, these contributions also analyze the strategies of movements to build trust between activists and decision-makers. Analyzing authoritarian regimes through a case study on Egypt, Nadine Sika’s (2023) article “The consequences of trust and repression on the rise and fall of movements in authoritarian regime” demonstrates the complex relation between interpersonal trust and its impact on developing social movements and contention. Most notably, Sika develops a repertoire of trust-eroding strategies. While scholars of anti-regime mobilization tend to focus on the violent and/or legal repression of activists, Sika demonstrates that, to counter high interpersonal trust levels inside movements, authoritarian regimes also utilize movement infiltration and cooptation as trust-eroding strategies with the intention to demobilize movements and citizens at large.

Looking at the post-soviet authoritarian regime of Belarus, in “The role of trust in Belarusian societal mobilization (2020–2021),” Nadja Douglas (2024) analyzes the role of institutional and interpersonal trust during the social mobilization against the regime in 2020–2021. She explores the interplay of social/interpersonal as well as institutional/political trust during periods of societal mobilization. The article relies on data from problem-centered interviews, conducted in Belarus between 2017 and 2020, as well as on two nation-wide surveys realized on behalf of the Centre for East European and International Studies in December 2020 and June 2021. In her analysis, she demonstrates how repression particularly by the police affected both institutional trust and the level of protest mobilization. At the same time, she finds a correlation between protest participation and the increase of social trust.

Moving from authoritarian to democratic regimes, Nicole Doerr and Janus Hansen (2024) study the relation between trust-building strategies by activists advocating for green transitions and their governments in German and Danish municipalities. In “‘Climate translators’ building trust and local democratic cooperation on green transition: Denmark and Germany,” they argue that in a context of rising time pressure for societies to transition toward climate-friendly policies, some democratic theorists hope that climate justice activists and their democratic innovations such as referendum campaigns or deliberative citizen assemblies may build trust locally to advance local environmental governance. However, despite the large field of research on local civic engagement and democracy in social movements, we lack systematic, empirical comparative research on how organizers of climate citizen assemblies and referendum campaigns use their position to build trust between activists and decision-makers such as majors and political parties bridging different ideologies and identities to influence and shape solutions toward green transition. This article contributes to filling this gap by infusing theories of democratic innovation, dialogue, and trust building through participatory and deliberative democracy in social movements and institutions with fresh empirical insights into the still understudied work of trust building by grassroots activists and “climate translators” advocating local policy change toward green transition in Denmark and Germany.

Key findings

Taken together, the contributions to the special issue show that the analytical framework proposed in this introduction is indeed helpful to systematically study trust dynamics in social movements and thereby gain a better understanding of important processes that characterize and shape the dynamics of mobilization. More specifically, taking trust seriously yields particularly important findings for two research areas in social movement studies, namely the literature on coalitions and alliances as well as studies on social mobilization in authoritarian regimes.

As regards the literature on coalitions and alliances (see, for instance, Zajak and Haunss, 2022), this special issue confirms the importance of the role of trust and trust building in coalition politics, for social movements to emerge and be successful. First, the contributions underline why horizontal trust in fellow movement supporters and would-be allies is indeed important to facilitate collaboration across groups and organizations: Jointly engaging in contentious action involves manifold risks that range from physical threats to individual activists (in the face of state repression) (Douglas, 2024; Ho, 2023; Sika, 2023) to risks that threaten the particular identity and interests and, hence, the survival of individual groups and organizations (Piper et al., 2023; Rossi, 2023). For social movements and coalitions to emerge in the first place, a minimal level of mutual trust seems therefore needed. But for movements and coalitions to sustain themselves over time, what appears to be even more important is the capacity to (continuously) build trust—and, as the contributions show, there are several strategies and mechanisms through which movements and coalition do so. As the flipside of this dynamic, we also see that the failure to build or maintain trust can constitute an important cause of the weakening, division, or even collapse of social movements and coalitions (Piper et al., 2023; Rossi, 2023).

Second, what becomes clear is that trust relations in the context of contentious politics are very dynamic, with trust being gained and lost, both in different time frames, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Trust research usually assumes that trust building is a slow process, while breaches of trust destroy it rather fast. The cases at hand, however, suggest that at times trust can also be built quite quickly, in the instance of collective contentious action. For the case of Belarus, Douglas demonstrates that participants in the 2020 mass protests showed an increase of social trust, while social trust levels in general saw a decrease after the revolution. ²

Third, there are different ways of building trust within social movements. Trust building is active work, and here, a whole range of actors—activists, state actors as well as brokers or translators, in Doerr’s and Hansen’s terminology (2024)—play an important, direct, and deliberate role. Trust building, however, also is the side effect of activities and practices that movements and organizations engage in for other purposes, such as when movements and coalitions deliberate about their agenda and strategy or when they jointly engage in protest. Overall, we observe a lot of trial and error when it comes to managing trust relations.

Fourth, the need for trust differs from case to case as Diani (2023) shows in his comparison of UK and South African social networks: The latter found trust in leaders more important than the British cases, evidence that the case study on a South African coalition presented by Piper et al. (2023) supports. In future research, more systematic comparisons will be useful to identify the context conditions of specific trust needs in more detail. Furthermore, we need a more fine-grained typology of trust that fits the particular logics of social mobilization and coalition building. For instance, as the role of trust in social movement leaders shows, within movements, we also need to look at a type of social, but vertical trust that cuts across the established distinction between vertical, political, and horizontal social trust. In addition, Piper et al.’s (2023) argument about organizational trust suggests the need to think more about this peculiar, collective type of horizontal trust (between organizations), which is arguably a key factor in the coalition politics of social movements (and beyond) (see also Rossi, 2023).

The other major research area to which this special issue makes significant contributions concerns the dynamics and challenges of mobilization in non-democratic settings. By zooming in on different anti-regime protests that have occurred across the globe since 2011, the contributions—again—confirmed the crucial importance of trust in dealing with risks and overcoming fear (Douglas, 2024; Ho, 2023; Sika, 2023). As in the case of coalition building, authors highlight how trust is built, but—given the difficulty of engaging in more sustained processes of organization and coalition building under conditions of outright repression—the emphasis here is more on concrete protest events and activities. In this context, preexisting trust networks do matter, which confirms existing scholarship. Still, there is much more at play. The contributions suggest a complex interplay of different forms of (dis-)trust.

Connecting the study of intra-movement organization with mobilization dynamics, Rossi (2023) lays out different pathways of organizational learning, some of them more successful in building trust inside the movement than others. Together with Doerr and Hansen (2024) and Ho (2023), Piper et al. (2023) and Sika (2023) observe specific ways in which activists and movements deal with the risks involved in building trust. In addition, the contributions highlight how much trust is an object of contestation. On the one hand, trust is actively built by protesters vis-à-vis their own movement but also with a view to the general population, to whom they present themselves as trustworthy. On the other hand, the contributions highlight how political regimes or governments respond to the challenges posed by social movements by actively trying to shape trust relations. In addition to the obvious aim to secure or restore political trust as a means to stabilize their rule, this also involves deliberate strategies to weaken or destroy both trust between activists and citizen trust in social movements. The result is a kind of cat-and-mouse game, with learning and adaptation taking place among ruling elites as well as among activists.

This special issue has deliberately focused on the dynamics and role of horizontal trust within social movements to allow for greater coherence among the set of in-depth studies collected here and thereby also facilitate the identification of comparative findings. In future research, studies should more systematically investigate the role of political trust for social mobilization as well as the interplay between political and social trust. We hope the analytical framework proposed here facilitates such a research agenda that takes trust in its different and interrelated forms seriously to improve our understanding of the complex dynamics involved with social mobilization and contentious politics. Trust and social movements, we hope to have shown, is a promising field of study that opens up several avenues for further research and that this special issue has just started to explore.