The Dark Matter of World Politics: System Trust, Summits, and State Personhood

The Tel Aviv University School of Political Science is delighted to invite you to a talk by Prof. Jennifer Mitzen (Ohio State University), taking place as part of our departmental seminar speaker series. 

The talk will take place on Monday, April 25, 16:15. It will be held in room 527 in the Naftali building.

It will also be broadcast live on Zoom.

The title of the talk is “The Dark Matter of World Politics: System Trust, Summits, and State Personhood”, and it is based on a recently accepted paper in International Organization. 

Paper's abstract:

International Relations (IR) theory has had a trust revival, with scholars focusing on how trust can enhance inter-personal cooperation attempts between leaders. We propose there is another type of trust in play in world politics. International system trust refers to a feeling of confidence in the international social order, which is indexed especially by trust in its central unit, state persons. System trust anchors ontological security, and its presence is an unstated assumption of the IR trust scholarship. In this paper we conceptualize system trust. We illuminate its presence by flagging the production of state personhood in a familiar case in IR trust scholarship, the 1985 Geneva Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. Inter-personal and system trust perspectives highlight different aspects of the same summit. The juxtaposition suggests new lines of research into: the production of state persons in diplomacy, the relationship between inter-personal and system trust, and the impact of the rise of personalistic/patrimonial leadership on diplomacy and international order.

Click here to see the invitation poster and Zoom link

We are looking forward to seeing you!