The Challenges to Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Birmingham
Department Name: POLSIS
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Nicholas Wheeler (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Baker, J.
(2014)
'Deciphering Obama's letter to the Supreme Leader'
Bukovansky
(2012)
Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power
Keating, V.C.
(2014)
No need to hedge: Trusting Relationships in International Politics
in Review of International Studies
Naomi Head (Author)
(2012)
Transforming conflict : trust, empathy, dialogue, and the Iranian nuclear crisis
Nicholas Wheeler (Co-Author)
(2012)
Iranian nuclear negotiations : a long way from trust
in RUSI newsbrief
Ruzicka J
(2015)
Going global: Trust research and international relations
in Journal of Trust Research
Walker W
(2013)
The Problem of Weak Nuclear States
in The Nonproliferation Review
WHEELER N
(2013)
Investigating diplomatic transformations
in International Affairs
Wheeler, N. J.
(2015)
Iran nuclear deal is built on trust as well as verification
Wheeler, N. J.
(2014)
'From Distrust to Trust in Adversarial Relationships'
Wheeler, N. J.
(2012)
'Trust-Building in Contemporary Conflicts: A Conflict Transformation Workshop'
Wheeler, N. J.
(2015)
How Brazil and Argentina defused their nuclear rivalry
Wheeler, N. J.
(2012)
Breaking the Deadlock in the Iranian Nuclear Negotiations
Wheeler, N. J.
(2013)
Trust crucial in high-stakes nuclear talks with Iran
Wheeler, N. J.
(2012)
'Trust-Building in International Relations'
in Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding
| Description | When I began work on this project, there was little research on trust in the field of International Relations (IR) (key exceptions were works by Deborah Welch Larson, Andrew Kydd, and Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett), especially outside of the United States, though there was a lot of work on trust outside of IR. The same verdict would not apply now, and the Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds (TBNW) project and the successor projects that have grown out of it have made a significant contribution to filling that gap, especially in the UK context. In the last ten years, a new network of scholars has emerged working on trust and empathy who have had varying degrees of connection with the project. Examples include Laura Considine (Leeds and previously the linked PhD Studentship on the TBNW project); Naomi Head (Glasgow); Vincent Keating (Aberystwyth and now University of Southern Denmark); Dani Nedal (Pittsburgh and formerly research assistant on the TBNW project and a key researcher and organiser of the Argentina-Brazil Critical Oral History (COH) Workshop,, see below); Jan Ruzicka (Aberystwyth and a former research assistant on the TBNW project); Nicola Horsburgh (King's College, London), Kate Sullivan (Oxford), Heather Williams (King's College, London), Marion Messmer (Co-Director of BASIC), and a number of PhD students who have worked with me at Birmingham (Josh Baker, Ana Alecsandru, Daniel Rio Tinto, and Chiara Cervasio), the first two funded by the ESRC. The key launching point for TBNW was assembling a multidisciplinary core group of scholars in an effort to apply the insights and ideas from trust research in other fields to thinking about the challenge of reducing distrust and building trust between nuclear armed and arming adversaries. One of the key methodological innovations of the ESRC/AHRC TBNW project was applying a COH approach to a case where cooperation and not conflict had developed out of bilateral nuclear interactions. The COH method, pioneered notably by James Blight and Janet Lang, and by Blight and David Welch, brings former participants together with scholars expert in these cases and using archival materials, to see if it is possible to better understand the decisions that the former officials and policy-makers made at the time. Previously, the COH method has only been applied to conflict situations, but my project broke new ground by applying the method to the successful case of the Argentina-Brazil nuclear rapprochement. Working with Matias Spektor, Rodrigo Mallea, and the team of researchers at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), we held in Rio the first COH conference where negotiators from both sides had an opportunity to share their memories on the back of newly-released secret documents and with the support of a group of academics. A major output of this work was our 2012 edited work The Origins of Nuclear Cooperation: A Critical Oral History between Brazil and Argentina. The COH transcript and film that accompanies it reveals how it was the empathy and trust that developed between Brazilian and Argentine decision-makers at the highest levels of diplomacy that was decisive to a cooperative outcome. Through a series of face-to-face meetings, Brazilian President José Sarney and his Argentinean counterpart, President Raúl Alfonsin, developed a trusting relationship, and it was this interpersonal trust that made possible agreement on mutual nuclear inspections. The key finding from the Argentina-Brazil COH as to the importance of face-to-face interaction in the development interpersonal trust became the key proposition that guided my book Trusting Enemies: Interpersonal Relationships in International Conflict that was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. The book was the first to theorize interpersonal trust at the international level and I applied my model of interpersonal trust to three cases of nuclear enmity. I excluded the Argentina-Brazil case from the book because it is best conceived as a case of rivalry and not deep distrust and I wanted to explore how far interpersonal trust could develop even in situations of nuclear enmity. The book draws on the following three case studies (US/Soviet Union, India/Pakistan, and US/Iran) arguing that face-to-face diplomacy at the leader-to-leader level opened up diplomatic breakthroughs in these cases. The work shows that a key precondition for interpersonal trust development in adversarial situation is the exercise of empathy, and in particular the exercise of what Ken Booth and I call 'security dilemma sensibility' (SDS), a concept we developed in our 2008 book The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). SDS is a form of empathy that is predicated on an intuition or belief that an adversary may be acting out of fear and insecurity and not malign intent; crucially, it involves the recognition as to how one's own actions have contributed to these fears and insecurity. I argue in Trusting Enemies that the best modality of interaction for testing out these intuitions and conveying them to the other side is face-to-face diplomacy. If both sides can develop and experience SDS through face-to-face interaction, this opens up the possibility for trust to develop through a process of interpersonal bonding (Wheeler 2018; see also Holmes and Wheeler 2020 for a model of social bonding in interpersonal diplomatic interaction). |
| Exploitation Route | The importance of empathy in nuclear diplomacy guides the ongoing BASIC-ICCS Programme on nuclear responsibilities which is funded by the UK government's Counter-Proliferation and Arms Control Centre (CPACC) and the ESRC through the Collaborative PhD Studentship (awarded to Alice Spilman) it funds between BASIC and the University of Birmingham (UoB). I am the academic lead on the programme which, building in part on the outcomes from the award, has identified a dialogical method involving two key processes: (i) critical introspection which invites participants representing different states to critically reflect on their own perceptions of their nuclear responsibilities and the responsibilities of others and (ii) empathic dialogue that brings participants into a facilitated process of dialogue aimed at achieving a better understanding of how each views the other's conception of their responsibilities, opening up space for the development of new shared responsibilities. A full discussion of the approach and the method is set out in Nuclear Responsibilities. A New Approach for Thinking and Talking About Nuclear Weapons (Brixey-Williams and Wheeler 2020). BASIC and ICCS launched the report at a side event of the United Nations First Committee in November 2020. The report distills the findings of policy roundtables held with officials and other stakeholders in London, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Geneva, the Hague, and São Paulo, states with very different approaches to the legitimacy of nuclear weapons. We then brought representatives together in London for a multistate dialogue in January 2020. The results suggested considerable potential for the Nuclear Responsibilities Approach to promote a more constructive dialogue on nuclear weapons, as well as to be adapted in the future to facilitate a wider dialogue encompassing cyber, space and other strategic domains. The current phase of the BASIC-ICCS Programme on Nuclear Responsibilities (2020-2021) is focused on the Asia-Pacific. Given the challenges of Covid-19, we are conducting a series of semi-structured interviews with key practitioners in India, Pakistan, China, Australia, and several ASEAN states aimed at preparing the ground for a series of virtual dialogues to be held later in the year. It is our intention to follow this up with face-to-face meetings as soon as circumstances permit. This phase of the research, building on the findings from the award, proceeds from the core premise that distrust reduction and trust-building should be conceived as distinct analytical processes. However, existing international relations scholarship on trust has not theorised these two processes as separate ones; rather, practitioners and scholars have focused almost exclusively on how to build trust between enemies, without exploring how to initiate processes of distrust reduction. Distinguishing processes of distrust-reduction from processes of trust-building is a key area for future research and has key policy implications for thinking about how to reduce distrust in adversarial nuclear relationships. In addition, a key goal of our dialogues in the Asia-Pacific is facilitating the cultivation of new empathic sensibilities on the part of practitioners towards the security concerns of others in a way that will promote new practices of mutual security and nuclear risk-reduction. Understanding how decision-makers who are locked into enemy images (Wheeler 2018) develop new emphatic sensibilities remains a key challenge for both future research and policy-making. In exploring these possibilities through the BASIC-ICCS Programme on Nuclear Responsibilities, the project team led by Brixey-Williams (Co-director of BASIC and Programme Director) and Wheeler have developed the Nuclear Responsibilities Method as a variant of Herbert Kelman's 'Interactive Problem Solving Workshop' method in the belief this might open up new spaces for participants who 'represent' particular states to exercise security dilemma sensibility (SDS), leading potentially to the development of new trusting relationships at the interpersonal level that can promote cooperative outcomes at the interstate level. |
| Sectors | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Security and Diplomacy |
| URL | https://www.paccsresearch.org.uk/blog/trust-building/ |
| Description | The first major impact of the project has been on the activities of specific NGOs in the security field who have incorporated the project's research on trust into their work, namely: Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House The research that I have conducted on the ideas and beliefs that inhibit trust, and those that can promote it, was influential in Sir Richard Dalton's Chatham House paper on the Iran nuclear negotiations in February 2013. The paper grew out of a closed meeting at Chatham House where I delivered the only paper (testimonial on file from Dalton - see also Baker, Lucas and Wheeler 2012; Nedal and Wheeler 2012; Wheeler 2013; Baker and Wheeler 2014). The European Leadership Network Dr Ian Kearns (Director of the European Leadership Network) has acknowledged the impact of my research on the ELN's work on NATO-Russia trust-building (see Durkelac, Kulesa, and Kearns 2013; testimony on file from Kearns). Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace My research has had a valuable impact on the Indian-based NGO, WISCOMP. I delivered training on the theory and practice of trust building in 2010 (using a variant of Herbert Kelman's 'interactive problem-solving' method) to Indian early-career scholars, government officials, and representatives from industry, the Media, and the Arts. My research has had an important impact on how WISCOMP has framed its own trust-building and conflict transformation activities (Sewak 2011; testimonial on file from the Director of WISCOMP; Wheeler 2011, 2012). All these activities have the potential for generating further, longer-term impact in the years ahead. In addition, the new project that Wheeler is leading on 'Nuclear Ethics and Global Nuclear Governance' under the ESRC/AHRC's Ethics, Rights and Security programme will provide further opportunities for impact with regard to this project on trust. The second major impact of the project has been in relation to the work on Argentine-Brazilian nuclear cooperation that was conducted in partnership with Dr Matias Spektor's team at FGV, Rio. The centre-piece of this effort has been the Critical Oral History (COH) conference that was held in Rio in February 2012. The publication of the conference transcript and associated commentary in the form of an edited book produced by the project team will provide a unique record, as seen from the perspective of the key officials who were central to the process of cooperation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book, published in English, Portuguese, and Spanish will be accessible from June 2015 on the website of The Wilson Centre's Cold War International History Project. In addition to the conference transcript, which provides new insights into how these two regional rivals de-escalated their nuclear competition, a film of the making of the Rio COH meeting will also be available on the Wilson Centre website. Two of the research fellows on the joint ICCS-FGV project, Dr. Carlo Patti and Ms. Renata Dalaqua, have used materials from the COH transcript to critically engage officials from The Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) in technical meetings over the course of 2013 and 2014. In addition, Spektor is actively engaged in conversations on Brazil's nuclear history, and the implications for future policy, with key decision makers such as Brazil's Defence Minister, Celso Amorim, and Foreign Minister Antônio Patriota. Spektor and Wheeler plan, in conjunction with Professor John Tirman at MIT and Malcolm Byrne at the US National Security Archive, to develop a new project exploring Amorim's role in the 2010 Tehran Declaration, bringing together Iranian, Brazilian, US, and Turkish officials in a future COH meeting. The third impact of the project has been capacity development. This has taken two related forms: first, the project has played a pivotal role in the development in the UK of a new, cross-disciplinary research grouping that is investigating the role of trust in world politics. In particular, the project has become a magnet for the following early career researchers: Laura Considine (the linked PhD Studentship on the project), Naomi Head (Glasgow); Vincent Keating (formerly Durham and now University of Southern Denmark); Jan Ruzicka (Aberystwyth); Kate Sullivan (Oxford); Heather Williams (King's College London); and Ben Zala (Leicester). The second aspect of capacity building has been the project's institutionalization through the creation of the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security (ICCS) at the University of Birmingham in February 2012, of which Wheeler is the first director. The Institute will, with the appointments currently being made, boast the largest concentration of research expertise in Europe, and perhaps the world, focused on the challenge of how to build trust in adversarial relationships, both within and between states. The grouping includes four PhD students working on trust and empathy with Wheeler and colleagues at the University of Birmingham: Joshua Baker and Ana Alecsandru are ESRC DTC students, whilst Scott Edwards and Sumedh Rao are funded by the University of Birmingham. The research taking place in the ICCS retains a strong nuclear focus with Wheeler's continuing research into the cases of US-Iran and India-Pakistan relations, the work of Baker on US-Iran nuclear relations, and Alecsandru on the role of trust in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In addition, the new ESRC funded project led by Wheeler on Nuclear Ethics and Global Nuclear Governance has a key focus on the future role of the NPT (a member of the project team is currently representing the ICCS at the 2015 NPT Review Conference). More broadly, the ICCS delivers an annual training programme in 'Trust, Diplomacy and Conflict Transformation', as well as offering a Master's degree in Global Cooperation and Security. The training programme and Master's degree provide important platforms for long-term impact. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2015 |
| Sector | Education,Security and Diplomacy |
| Impact Types | Societal |
| Description | Article in the Washington Post Monkey Cage |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | With Marcus Holmes, 'With Trump leaving on his first foreign trip, here are 4 lessons about face-to-face diplomacy', The Washington Post (Monkey Cage), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/05/19/trump-will-be-meeting-with-lots-of-foreign-leaders-here-are-4-reasons-this-is-important/, 19 May 2017. The purpose was to raise awareness of the importance of the interpersonal in foreign policy decision-making and international relations. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/05/19/trump-will-be-meeting-with-lots-of-for... |
| Description | Article on trust-building and North Korea |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | With Marcus Holmes, 'Time for Jimmy Carter to go back to North Korea', The Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2017/05/time-for-jimmy-carter-to-go-back-to-north-korea/, 11 May 2017. The purpose of the piece was to show how an earlier nuclear crisis between the United States and North Korea was defused by face-to-face diplomacy and the potential for this approach to diplomacy to be utilised to de-escalae the nuclear crisis between President Donald Trump and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://thediplomat.com/2017/05/time-for-jimmy-carter-to-go-back-to-north-korea/ |
| Description | Diplomatic Transformations in International Anarchy |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Martin Wight Memorial Lecture given at Chatham House, London. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| Description | Martin Wight Memorial Lecture |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Delivered the 2013 Martin Wight Memorial Lecture |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2346.12028/abstract |
| Description | Researching the 2003-2006 Nuclear Negotiations Between Iran and the West |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Lecture given at 'Challenges of Security Cooperation in Europe' conference at Aberystwyth University. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |