Building trust among enemies: The central challenge for international conflict resolution

The article presents an approach to the gradual building of trust among enemies, who-even when they have an interest in making peace-are afraid to extend trust to each other lest it jeopardize their own existence. Efforts to resolve the conflict, therefore, confront a basic dilemma: Parties cannot enter into a peace process without some degree of mutual trust, but they cannot build trust without entering into a peace process. The article discusses the ways in which interactive problem solving-a form of unofficial diplomacy, which the author has applied most extensively to the Israeli-Palestinian case-attempts to deal with this dilemma. It describes five concepts that have proven useful to confronting this dilemma in problem-solving workshops with politically influential Israelis and Palestinians and that should also be relevant to trust building in the larger peace process: the view of movement toward peace as a process of successive approximations, in which the level of commitment gradually increases with the level of reassurance; the role of the third party as a repository of trust, particularly in the early stages of the process; the focus on “working trust” in the other's seriousness about peace based on their own interests (rather than interpersonal trust based on good will); the view of the relationship between participants in the peace process as an uneasy coalition; and the development of a systematic process of mutual reassurance, based on responsiveness and reciprocity.