Mistrust

Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and good, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It allows for complex political systems, permits human communication, underpins financial instruments and economic institutions, and holds society itself together. There is scant space within this vision for a nuanced discussion of mistrust. With few exceptions, it is treated as little more than a corrosive absence. This monograph, instead, proposes an ethnographic and conceptual exploration of mistrust as a legitimate epistemological stance in its own right. It examines the impact of mistrust on practices of conversation and communication, friendship and society, as well as politics and cooperation, and suggests that suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty can also ground ways of organizing human society and cooperating with others.

The rise of mistrust is provoking a crisis for representative democracy—solutions lie in the endless creativity of social movements. From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, and from cryptocurrency advocates to the #MeToo movement, Americans and citizens of democracies worldwide are losing confidence in what we once called the system. This loss of faith has spread beyond government to infect a broad swath of institutions—the press, corporations, digital platforms—none of which seem capable of holding us together. The dominant theme of contemporary civic life is mistrust in institutions—governments, big business, the health care system, the press. How should we encourage participation in public life when neither elections nor protests feel like paths to change? Drawing on work by political scientists, legal theorists, and activists in the streets, Ethan Zuckerman offers a lens for understanding civic engagement that focuses on efficacy, the power of seeing the change you make in the world. Mistrust introduces a set of "levers"—law, markets, code, and norms—that all provide ways to move the world. Zuckerman helps readers understand what relationships they want to have with existing institutions—Do they want to hold them responsible and make them better? Overthrow them and replace them with something entirely new? While some contemporary leaders weaponize mistrust to gain power, activists can use their mistrust to fuel something else. Today, many people are passionate about making positive change in the world, but they feel like the "right" ways to make change are disempowering and useless. Zuckerman argues that while it may be reasonable to dispense with politics as usual, we must not give up on changing the world. Often the best way to make that change is not to pass laws—it’s to change minds. Mistrust is a guidebook for those looking for new ways to participate in civic life, as well as a fascinating explanation of how we’ve arrived at a moment where old ways of engagement are failing us.

Develops a theory of trust in international relations and applies it to the Cold War. Contrary to the common view that both sides were willing to compromise but failed because of mistrust, this work argues that most of the mistrust in the Cold War was justified, because the Soviets were not trustworthy.

Synthesizing different understandings of trust and mistrust from the theoretical traditions of economics, psychology, and game theory, Larson analyzes five cases that might have been turning points in U.S.-Soviet relations.

This book examines the social practice of mistrust through the lens of social anthropology. In focusing on the citizens of the Caucasus, a region located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Mühlfried counters the postcolonial discourse that routinely treats these individuals, known for their mistrust of the state, as “others.” Combining ethnographic observations presenting mistrust as an observable reality with socio-political issues from a non-Western region, Mühlfried opens up a non-Eurocentric perspective on an underexplored social practice and a major counterpoint to the well-examined social phenomenon of “trust.” This perspective allows for a more profound understanding of pressing issues such as populist movements and post-truth politics.

This book looks at the causes, consequences and control of mistrust. It provides a model for understanding and combatting it. With examples from the US presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic it is a contemporary exploration of this phenomenon,

The importance of research on the notion of trust has grown considerably in the social sciences over the last three decades. Much has been said about the decline of political trust in democracies and intense debates have occurred about the nature and complexity of the relationship between trust and democracy. Political trust is usually understood as trust in political institutions (including trust in political actors that inhabit the institutions), trust between citizens, and to a lesser extent, trust between groups. However, the literature on trust has given no special attention to the issue of trust between minority and majority nations in multinational democracies – countries that are not only multicultural but also constitutional associations containing two or more nations or peoples whose members claim to be self-governing and have the right of self-determination. This volume, part of the work of the Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales (GRSP), is a comparative study of trust, distrust, and mistrust in multinational democracies, centring on Canada, Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Beliefs, attitudes, practices, and relations of trust, distrust, and mistrust are studied as situated, interacting, and coexisting phenomena that change over time and space. Contributors include Dario Castiglione (Exeter), Jérôme Couture (INRS-UCS), Kris Deschouwer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jean Leclair (Montréal), Patti Tamara Lenard (Ottawa), Niels Morsink (Antwerp), Geneviève Nootens (Chicoutimi), Darren O’Toole (Ottawa), Alexandre Pelletier (Toronto), Réjean Pelletier (Laval), Philip Resnick (UBC), David Robichaud (Ottawa), Peter Russell (Toronto), Richard Simeon (Toronto), Dave Sinardet (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and Jeremy Webber (Victoria).

Focusing on the creation and misuse of government documents in Vietnam since the 1920s, The Government of Mistrust reveals how profoundly the dynamics of bureaucracy have affected Vietnamese efforts to build a socialist society. In examining the flurries of paperwork and directives that moved back and forth between high- and low-level officials, Ken MacLean underscores a paradox: in trying to gather accurate information about the realities of life in rural areas, and thus better govern from Hanoi, the Vietnamese central government employed strategies that actually made the state increasingly illegible to itself. MacLean exposes a falsified world existing largely on paper. As high-level officials attempted to execute centralized planning via decrees, procedures, questionnaires, and audits, low-level officials and peasants used their own strategies to solve local problems. To obtain hoped-for aid from the central government, locals overstated their needs and underreported the resources they actually possessed. Higher-ups attempted to re-establish centralized control and legibility by creating yet more bureaucratic procedures. Amidst the resulting mistrust and ambiguity, many low-level officials were able to engage in strategic action and tactical maneuvering that have shaped socialism in Vietnam in surprising ways.