Time to get emotional: Phronetic reflections on the concept of trust in International Relations

Abstract

This article will engage with the growing literature on the subject of trust in international politics by pointing out remaining problems and contradictions in recent critiques against the rationalist mainstream. Although it finds itself in agreement with these critiques it will argue that despite its more nuanced appreciation of trust, this critical scholarship does not quite succeed in either leaving the rationalist conceptions behind or in achieving a more substantial account of the concept of trust. In order to do so the article will first challenge the remaining methodological framework in which trust scholarship is couched. Second, the article will proceed to show how the emotive element in acts of trust can be highlighted when approached through a phronetic lens and how the introduction of emotion into trust scholarship in IR will allow a richer and thicker study of the phenomenon of trust in international politics. Centrally, the article will claim that any study of trust which ignores the elementary emotional component will remain incomplete.