‘Poisons Disguised with Honey’: European Expansion and the Sacred Trust of Civilization

For many centuries now, those considering themselves civilized have carried out numerous atrocities—from abductions to dispossession to massacres—against those thought to be less civilized, all in the name of civilization. This has particularly been the case in the last 500 years when Europeans came into contact with indigenous peoples in their voyages of discovery and subsequent settlement. One of the justifications for these offences was often couched in terms of the self-appointed duty of “civilized” Europeans to bring the blessings of civilization to the “savage” and “barbarian” hordes, also called the “white man's burden” or the “burden of civilization.” Many nations took up this sacred trust of civilization and the challenge of bringing enlightenment and salvation to the uncivilized peoples of the world, during which the latter were either subjugated or perished. In this article I trace the intellectual heritage of the sacred trust and note its inherent contradictions, ranging from debates between Sepúlveda and Las Casas over Spain's rights of conquest in the New World to the musings of key Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Hegel, Kant, and J. S. Mill. As some of its advocates acknowledge the sacred trust and concomitant civilizing missions were inevitably and invariably violent and went against the very idea of civilization. And as Las Casas deftly highlighted, much of the reasoning underpinning the sacred trust was in the form of “poisons disguised with honey.”     

Trust in world politics: converting ‘identity’ into a source of security through trust-learning

In the discipline of international relations, the concept of trust has been theorised in two ways: the ‘rationalist’ approach and the ‘normative’ approach. This article aims to show that these approaches do not adequately reflect how trust operates in world politics and that trust provides a new way of understanding the identity–security nexus in international relations. It is argued that as actors learn to trust each other, this trust-learning process has a transformative effect on their definition of self-interests and identities. The elaborated understanding of trust in the security dilemma is operationalised in terms of the immigration security dilemma.     

Tackling Social Exclusion: The Role of Social Capital in Urban Regeneration on Merseyside — From Mistrust to Trust?

In recent years community involvement and increasingly social capital have become central themes in debates and policies surrounding urban regeneration. This paper attempts to contribute to these debates by reviewing the role of social capital in the context of a major regeneration initiative, namely the European Union-sponsored Objective One Programme, currently underway on Merseyside. The paper argues that it is important to show how social capital is formed through the 'scaling-up' of local associational relationships, networks and institutions, to wider power structures and relations. Trust amongst participants is central to this process. Two areas on Merseyside are used as case studies to illustrate the argument. The paper concludes that the active development of trust and the social relationships surrounding it needs to be central to the process of urban regeneration.