Spannungsabbau und Vertrauensaufbau

"Permanent peace cannot be prepared by threats but only by the honest attempt to create mutual trust". This quote from Albert Einstein emphasizes the important role trust plays in building peace. Particularly in the aftermath of violent conflict, trusting the former opponents a challenging undertaking. This chapter engages with the question of tension reduction and trust building. We introduce two concepts of tension reduction; first the "Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction" (GRIT, Osgood 1962) Strategy, which aims to reduce tension through small and transparent initiatives. Second, we introduce the concept of instrumental-pragmatic trust. When groups have mainly negative expectations regarding the intention and behavior of other groups, expecting friendly and open relations remains an unrealistic objective. However, if control mechanisms are in place which deter potential harm, tentative and calculated interactions can occur. These tension reductions differ from trust building. Trust and trust building first requires a change from negative expectations regarding the other, to positive. We elaborate in our chapter, that this transition engenders the challenges of trust research. How can trust systematically be built between conflict parties? Trust is an elusive concept, malleable to context. It is multidimensional, as no single dimension can describe the whole construct. To address the elusiveness of trust, we introduce the Intergroup-Trust Model (IGT-Model), which was developed deliberately for the intergroup context. As a comprehensive, but parsimonious model, the IGT-Model captures trust though five dimensions. Often, conflict parties and interveners already have intuitive ideas of how to build trust. The IGT-Model provides a framework for linking these ideas and systematically developing interventions for trust building. In this chapter we hope to provide an awareness of the fragility of trust in the context of intergroup conflict and provide starting points from which to engage with trust building.