Intuitively, reputation matters in daily life. Thus, it is unsurprising that scholars and statesmen have long held that reputation must also matter in international relations (IR) since Pericles. Yet, while reputation, especially reputation for resolve in (international) conflict, has enjoyed renewed attention in the past decade or so, few in-depth studies of reputation in (international) cooperation exist, other than a few studies on reputation in alliance and treaty compliance. Professor Shiping Tang takes a first step toward a preliminary theory of reputation in cooperation-building and provides some preliminary evidence that reputation in international cooperation can form and have effect, drawing from a diverse literature, including reputation in conflict and cooperation, trust and trustworthiness in sociology and social theory, and trust and cooperation in international relations and other areas. Professor Tang’s contributions are three-fold: conceptual, theoretical and empirical. He then connects with trustworthiness as reputation with US-China relations.
Our western societies have been building from neo-liberalism, greed, fear and control for the last 40 years. How is it now possible to move back to “trust” in the west.
This is now an urgent question with the onrushing mess of #climatechaos
In Oxford you have the move from trust to control in the card readers on all the doors over the last 20 years.