The ethics of trust in world politics

This article argues that actors in contemporary world politics display a 'propensity to comply' with international norms, regimes and regulations, and that this propensity is rooted, in part, in a 'presumption of trust'. However, this presumption is unstable in the contemporary context and increasingly so owing to the growing discrepancy between the legal and institutional forms of world politics and many of its most important processes, especially the complexity and types of agents, This is compounded by difficulties in the conceptualization of trust. The article concludes by outlining ways of evolving practices in world politics that might rectify this situation, focusing especially on 'shaming'-a practice that can generate trust, and hence support, and enhance the 'propensity to comply' with an ever-widening agenda of issues in an increasingly complex institutional environment.