Trust—a crucial ingredient of peaceful coexistence—is sparse worldwide. In many African and Latin American countries, less than 10 per cent of people agreed in a 2022 survey with the statement ‘most people can be trusted’. Perhaps significantly, last year Africa accounted for the largest number of active wars and Latin America was the most violent region in the world. The lack of trust between countries is evidenced by increased geopolitical tensions, eroding multilateral cooperation and rising military expenditures.
Building trust is especially difficult after armed conflict. Whether it is trust between conflict parties or populations affected by conflict, rebuilding trust in the wake of conflict involves overcoming deep-rooted animosities.
Trust in politics and international relations can be defined as the expectation that one actor or group will not intentionally engage in harmful behaviour towards another. It can be seen as a social decision entailing uncertainty and vulnerability. Rebuilding trust after violent conflict requires opportunities to connect and restore shattered relations between individuals, communities or countries. Influenced by contextual social, cultural, psychological and political factors, the process is neither linear nor uniform with no one-size-fits-all solutions.
This blog explores processes from past reconciliation efforts that are relevant for rebuilding trust. Lessons are drawn from five interconnected processes: re-humanization, truth-telling and reconciliation, justice and accountability, addressing the effects of trauma, and power-sharing. The form and implementation of each of them depends on the context and none is effective on its own. Furthermore, all are challenging, with many pitfalls to avoid.
Re-humanization
At the heart of genocide and war is dehumanization: seeing and treating specific groups of people as less than human or inherently evil. In extreme cases, dehumanization eliminates any moral qualms about harm being done to members of those groups, and even justifies it. Trust cannot be rebuilt on either side until those who are dehumanizing recognize the humanity of the other group. Recent psychological research has explored the mechanisms underlying dehumanization and how to rebuild empathy.
People-to-people initiatives have been a crucial tool of re-humanization in post-conflict settings, as they promote relational and structural conditions conducive to reconciliation, trust and peace. They include community work, volunteer mobilization and student exchanges. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was notorious for the dehumanizing rhetoric used by Hutu militias against the Tutsi minority. The Rwandan government has promoted re-humanization through community works committees providing opportunities for ‘conviviality among people’. The committees’ projects can bring together Hutus and Tutsis or the good of the community and have included, for example, rebuilding the houses of genocide victims.
Prominent initiatives promoting re-humanization are also to be found in the arts. The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, for example, was created to bring together young Israel, Palestinian and other Arab musicians to promote a sense of shared humanity through music.
Truth-telling and reconciliation
Truth-telling and reconciliation can also play an important role in rebuilding trust in the wake of conflict, including by breaking revenge cycles. Truth and reconciliation mechanisms provide platforms for both victims and perpetrators (often in exchange for partial amnesties or reduced sentences) to share their conflict experiences, apologize, expose systematic human rights abuses and individual atrocities, and investigate the causes and consequences of violence. At their best, they help work towards a shared historical narrative about the conflict (or at least ‘narrow the range of permissible lies’) and identify actions to avoid future abuses. Given that the animosity, hatred and mistrust between parties in protracted conflicts is bolstered by often biased and inaccurate narratives about past events, constructing new narratives and creating mutual historical empathy is crucial.
Over 30 truth and reconciliation commissions have been established, including in Latin American countries recovering from violent dictatorships and in numerous African countries recovering from conflict. Their success has varied. Their transformative impact depends on factors such as strong political support and legitimacy, and integration into broader justice and peace processes that include trials and amnesties.
Despite the challenges, and even risks, associated with such commissions, in the long term engaging with past atrocities through truth-finding is preferable to ‘collective amnesia’, as long as there is a public appetite for it. While a policy of silence about the atrocities committed by the regime of General Francisco Franco may have smoothed Spain’s political transition after 1975, it left simmering resentment and distrust of the new institutions and political class.
Justice and accountability
A third process for rebuilding trust is closing impunity gaps in conflict-affected countries. Another cause of resentment and distrust in post-Franco Spain was the blanket amnesties granted to members of the former regime, many of whom remained in positions of power. There is usually an expectation that human rights violations are accompanied by measures holding perpetrators accountable.
Successful justice and accountability measures can include both retributive justice, such as criminal prosecutions by independent courts, and restorative justice, including payment of reparations and restoration of property. A sense that justice has been done and perpetrators have paid for their actions can create better conditions for rebuilding trust.
Several international tribunals have been set up to deliver retributive justice for leaders accused of war crimes, such as the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which prosecuted senior members of the Nazi party, the international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court. The International Court of Justice is more focused on restorative justice, potentially imposing reparation orders on states deemed responsible for breaching international law, including during conflict. However, neither court has enforcement bodies, leaving states with the main responsibility to close impunity gaps.
At the state level, Germany during the 1960s tried high-profile Nazi personnel from the Auschwitz concentration camp. Signalling political and legal responsibility for the Holocaust opened avenues for restoring relations with France, Israel, Poland and others. So did Germany’s offer to pay Israel for Holocaust victims’ resettlement and for alleviating survivors’ suffering—reparations that continue to be paid today.
High-profile national trials are sometimes complemented with local traditional conflict-resolution methods focused on rebuilding a sense of community. These have the advantage of bringing the process into the localities where crimes were committed. Their success depends on factors such as active popular participation and perceptions of good faith and fairness.
The prominent case of the Gacaca courts in Rwanda, however, highlights some potential pitfalls. Despite their wide public acceptance, the record of these community-level courts in dealing with genocide-related cases was mixed. Gacaca courts tried 1.2 million cases, transferring the most serious into the regular legal system. The initiative made ordinary Rwandans the main actors in dispensing justice, with trials held in the communities where the offences had taken place, and helped families to find the bodies of murdered relatives. However, given that the judges and the parties frequently knew each other, the Gacaca courts arguably violated the right to a fair trial. They have also been criticized for procedural irregularities, witness intimidation and being used to silence government critics.
Whether retributive or restorative, policies and institutions that address specific and structural injustices are always needed. Trust and peace are undermined by weak rule of law, discrimination, exclusion, income inequality and polarization.
Another important consideration is that the success of justice and accountability mechanisms in rebuilding trust depends on their connections to other initiatives, such as reintegrating former combatants, education projects for youth (from opposing sides), and economic opportunities.
Addressing the effects of trauma
Rebuilding trust also often requires addressing the psychological impacts of trauma induced by conflict, which can pass from generation to generation. The impacts of trauma can make it hard for individuals to trust, and thus hinder reconciliation processes. Addressing trauma can also help to prevent future violence. Research indicates that the psychological fallout from witnessing and experiencing violence, particularly in childhood, can be associated with increased aggression and antisocial behaviour.
In many parts of the world children are growing up under fire and to the sound of missile alarms. In South Sudan, a generation of children has never known life outside camps for internally displaced people. However, the individualized mental health support needed to help people process their experiences and heal deep emotional wounds is rare in conflict settings. Children in particular are often overlooked. Practitioners are therefore shifting their attention to community-based interventions that build on existing individual and community resources, capacities and resilience.
Power-sharing
Finally, rival groups need reassurance and greater predictability regarding each other’s behaviour. This is crucial for rebuilding trust after conflict and encouraging both sides to take risks on the actions of their counterparts. One way to do this is through power-sharing political arrangements that provide incentives for constructive participation and collaboration.
The extent to which power-sharing can promote peace depends in part on its design (for example representation and decision making in the executive and legislature) but also on the relative military capacity of the conflict parties and the actions of potential ‘spoilers’. Power-sharing arrangements are more likely to sustain peace when they foster positive relationships between rival groups and can over time accommodate new political actors, and the costs of reverting to war are high. The power-sharing arrangement in the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, for example, aided Bosnia’s transition towards non-violent politics. Political leaders accepted the elections and institutions of the agreement and began interacting through common political processes.
Rebuilding trust as a foundation for lasting peace is a difficult, context-specific, multifaceted journey that needs to address the emotional, social, structural and political dimensions of conflict. The five processes discussed above are ineffective on their own and unlikely to bring about positive change in the absence of public demand, participation and strong political commitment. Under the right conditions, and in the right combination, over time they can help to change attitudes, rebuild trust and open a path towards more positive relations.
Building trust was a thematic focus of the 2024 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development. This blog is inspired and informed by several sessions, notably, ‘Building Trust in a Divided World’. ‘A New Agenda for Trust: Forging Peace in a Divided World’, ‘Rethinking Conflict Prevention’ and ‘Intersecting Crises, Joined-up Solutions’. The author thanks the speakers and participants in all these sessions for their invaluable insights.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Dr Simone Bunse is a Senior Researcher in the SIPRI Food, Peace and Security Programme.
Trust—a crucial ingredient of peaceful coexistence—is sparse worldwide. In many African and Latin American countries, less than 10 per cent of people agreed in a 2022 survey with the statement ‘most people can be trusted’. Perhaps significantly, last year Africa accounted for the largest number of active wars and Latin America was the most violent region in the world. The lack of trust between countries is evidenced by increased geopolitical tensions, eroding multilateral cooperation and rising military expenditures.
Building trust is especially difficult after armed conflict. Whether it is trust between conflict parties or populations affected by conflict, rebuilding trust in the wake of conflict involves overcoming deep-rooted animosities.
Trust in politics and international relations can be defined as the expectation that one actor or group will not intentionally engage in harmful behaviour towards another. It can be seen as a social decision entailing uncertainty and vulnerability. Rebuilding trust after violent conflict requires opportunities to connect and restore shattered relations between individuals, communities or countries. Influenced by contextual social, cultural, psychological and political factors, the process is neither linear nor uniform with no one-size-fits-all solutions.
This blog explores processes from past reconciliation efforts that are relevant for rebuilding trust. Lessons are drawn from five interconnected processes: re-humanization, truth-telling and reconciliation, justice and accountability, addressing the effects of trauma, and power-sharing. The form and implementation of each of them depends on the context and none is effective on its own. Furthermore, all are challenging, with many pitfalls to avoid.
Re-humanization
At the heart of genocide and war is dehumanization: seeing and treating specific groups of people as less than human or inherently evil. In extreme cases, dehumanization eliminates any moral qualms about harm being done to members of those groups, and even justifies it. Trust cannot be rebuilt on either side until those who are dehumanizing recognize the humanity of the other group. Recent psychological research has explored the mechanisms underlying dehumanization and how to rebuild empathy.
People-to-people initiatives have been a crucial tool of re-humanization in post-conflict settings, as they promote relational and structural conditions conducive to reconciliation, trust and peace. They include community work, volunteer mobilization and student exchanges. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was notorious for the dehumanizing rhetoric used by Hutu militias against the Tutsi minority. The Rwandan government has promoted re-humanization through community works committees providing opportunities for ‘conviviality among people’. The committees’ projects can bring together Hutus and Tutsis or the good of the community and have included, for example, rebuilding the houses of genocide victims.
Prominent initiatives promoting re-humanization are also to be found in the arts. The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, for example, was created to bring together young Israel, Palestinian and other Arab musicians to promote a sense of shared humanity through music.
Truth-telling and reconciliation
Truth-telling and reconciliation can also play an important role in rebuilding trust in the wake of conflict, including by breaking revenge cycles. Truth and reconciliation mechanisms provide platforms for both victims and perpetrators (often in exchange for partial amnesties or reduced sentences) to share their conflict experiences, apologize, expose systematic human rights abuses and individual atrocities, and investigate the causes and consequences of violence. At their best, they help work towards a shared historical narrative about the conflict (or at least ‘narrow the range of permissible lies’) and identify actions to avoid future abuses. Given that the animosity, hatred and mistrust between parties in protracted conflicts is bolstered by often biased and inaccurate narratives about past events, constructing new narratives and creating mutual historical empathy is crucial.
Over 30 truth and reconciliation commissions have been established, including in Latin American countries recovering from violent dictatorships and in numerous African countries recovering from conflict. Their success has varied. Their transformative impact depends on factors such as strong political support and legitimacy, and integration into broader justice and peace processes that include trials and amnesties.
Despite the challenges, and even risks, associated with such commissions, in the long term engaging with past atrocities through truth-finding is preferable to ‘collective amnesia’, as long as there is a public appetite for it. While a policy of silence about the atrocities committed by the regime of General Francisco Franco may have smoothed Spain’s political transition after 1975, it left simmering resentment and distrust of the new institutions and political class.
Justice and accountability
A third process for rebuilding trust is closing impunity gaps in conflict-affected countries. Another cause of resentment and distrust in post-Franco Spain was the blanket amnesties granted to members of the former regime, many of whom remained in positions of power. There is usually an expectation that human rights violations are accompanied by measures holding perpetrators accountable.
Successful justice and accountability measures can include both retributive justice, such as criminal prosecutions by independent courts, and restorative justice, including payment of reparations and restoration of property. A sense that justice has been done and perpetrators have paid for their actions can create better conditions for rebuilding trust.
Several international tribunals have been set up to deliver retributive justice for leaders accused of war crimes, such as the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which prosecuted senior members of the Nazi party, the international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court. The International Court of Justice is more focused on restorative justice, potentially imposing reparation orders on states deemed responsible for breaching international law, including during conflict. However, neither court has enforcement bodies, leaving states with the main responsibility to close impunity gaps.
At the state level, Germany during the 1960s tried high-profile Nazi personnel from the Auschwitz concentration camp. Signalling political and legal responsibility for the Holocaust opened avenues for restoring relations with France, Israel, Poland and others. So did Germany’s offer to pay Israel for Holocaust victims’ resettlement and for alleviating survivors’ suffering—reparations that continue to be paid today.
High-profile national trials are sometimes complemented with local traditional conflict-resolution methods focused on rebuilding a sense of community. These have the advantage of bringing the process into the localities where crimes were committed. Their success depends on factors such as active popular participation and perceptions of good faith and fairness.
The prominent case of the Gacaca courts in Rwanda, however, highlights some potential pitfalls. Despite their wide public acceptance, the record of these community-level courts in dealing with genocide-related cases was mixed. Gacaca courts tried 1.2 million cases, transferring the most serious into the regular legal system. The initiative made ordinary Rwandans the main actors in dispensing justice, with trials held in the communities where the offences had taken place, and helped families to find the bodies of murdered relatives. However, given that the judges and the parties frequently knew each other, the Gacaca courts arguably violated the right to a fair trial. They have also been criticized for procedural irregularities, witness intimidation and being used to silence government critics.
Whether retributive or restorative, policies and institutions that address specific and structural injustices are always needed. Trust and peace are undermined by weak rule of law, discrimination, exclusion, income inequality and polarization.
Another important consideration is that the success of justice and accountability mechanisms in rebuilding trust depends on their connections to other initiatives, such as reintegrating former combatants, education projects for youth (from opposing sides), and economic opportunities.
Addressing the effects of trauma
Rebuilding trust also often requires addressing the psychological impacts of trauma induced by conflict, which can pass from generation to generation. The impacts of trauma can make it hard for individuals to trust, and thus hinder reconciliation processes. Addressing trauma can also help to prevent future violence. Research indicates that the psychological fallout from witnessing and experiencing violence, particularly in childhood, can be associated with increased aggression and antisocial behaviour.
In many parts of the world children are growing up under fire and to the sound of missile alarms. In South Sudan, a generation of children has never known life outside camps for internally displaced people. However, the individualized mental health support needed to help people process their experiences and heal deep emotional wounds is rare in conflict settings. Children in particular are often overlooked. Practitioners are therefore shifting their attention to community-based interventions that build on existing individual and community resources, capacities and resilience.
Power-sharing
Finally, rival groups need reassurance and greater predictability regarding each other’s behaviour. This is crucial for rebuilding trust after conflict and encouraging both sides to take risks on the actions of their counterparts. One way to do this is through power-sharing political arrangements that provide incentives for constructive participation and collaboration.
The extent to which power-sharing can promote peace depends in part on its design (for example representation and decision making in the executive and legislature) but also on the relative military capacity of the conflict parties and the actions of potential ‘spoilers’. Power-sharing arrangements are more likely to sustain peace when they foster positive relationships between rival groups and can over time accommodate new political actors, and the costs of reverting to war are high. The power-sharing arrangement in the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, for example, aided Bosnia’s transition towards non-violent politics. Political leaders accepted the elections and institutions of the agreement and began interacting through common political processes.
Rebuilding trust as a foundation for lasting peace is a difficult, context-specific, multifaceted journey that needs to address the emotional, social, structural and political dimensions of conflict. The five processes discussed above are ineffective on their own and unlikely to bring about positive change in the absence of public demand, participation and strong political commitment. Under the right conditions, and in the right combination, over time they can help to change attitudes, rebuild trust and open a path towards more positive relations.
Building trust was a thematic focus of the 2024 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development. This blog is inspired and informed by several sessions, notably, ‘Building Trust in a Divided World’. ‘A New Agenda for Trust: Forging Peace in a Divided World’, ‘Rethinking Conflict Prevention’ and ‘Intersecting Crises, Joined-up Solutions’. The author thanks the speakers and participants in all these sessions for their invaluable insights.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)