Niels Byrjalsen defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Political Science
Title
What trust does. Mechanisms of order production in transatlantic relations.
The thesis
The thesis can be loaned from the Royal Danish Library.
Time and venue
Monday 18 March 2024 from 14:00-17:00 at Centre for Health and Society, Øster Farimagsgade 5, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., room 2.0.63. Kindly note that the defence will start precisely at 14:00.
Assessment committee
Professor Maria Mälksoo (Chair), University of Copenhagen
Professor Thierry Balzacq, Science Po Paris
Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler, University of Birmingham
Abstract:
It is widely acknowledged that there are good reasons to pay attention to trust in international relations. Yet, our understanding of the role of trust in international order production remains unclear and underdeveloped. While trust is often assumed to matter, especially in international communities, there is too little knowledge about how it influences the stability and change of international orders. This basic problem is particularly pertinent in the context of the transatlantic community, characterized by recurrent crises that threaten the shared order as well as a complex configuration of power and identity relations.
Therefore, with transatlantic relations as the empirical focal point, the dissertation theorizes how trust among states can influence the production of international orders. Specifically, the dissertation develops a model explaining how trust – understood as a distinct type of relation with distinctive action implications – shapes crisis interactions and thereby the stabilization processes through which orders are reproduced and changed. Trust works through five mechanisms: trust preservation, identification, dynamic politicization, cooperation, and power regulation. These mechanisms imply that trusting states tend to interact in ways that moderate the conflict level, foster cohesion, advance legitimacy, and enable renewal through the adjustment of socio-political practices, collective identities, and power relations. The theoretical arguments are illustrated and explored in relation to three important instances in transatlantic history: the Suez crisis, the Euromissiles crisis and Iraq war crisis.