NGOs are undergoing an alleged crisis of trustworthiness. The past decades have seen an increase in both academic and practitioner skepticism, particularly given the transformations many NGOs have undergone in size, professionalism, and political importance. The accountability agenda, which stresses transparency and external oversight, has gained a significant amount of traction as a means to solve this crisis. But the causal link between the implementation of these recommendations and increased trustworthiness among donors has never been considered. This paper bridges this gap by drawing on theoretical innovations in trust research to put forward three arguments. First, the proponents of the accountability agenda are implicitly working with a rational model of trust. Second, this model does not reflect important social characteristics of trust between donors and NGOs. Third, this mismatch means that the accountability agenda might do more to harm trust in NGOs than to help it.

The 2014–15 Ebola epidemic in West Africa highlighted the significance of trust between the public and public health authorities in the mitigation of health crises. Since the end of the epidemic, there has been a focus amongst scholars and practitioners on building resilient health systems, which many see as an important precondition for successfully combatting future outbreaks. While trust has been acknowledged as a relevant component of health system resilience, we argue for a more sustained theoretical engagement with underlying models of trust in the literature. This article takes a first step in showing the importance of theoretical engagement by focusing on the appeal to rational models of trust in particular in the health system resilience literature, and how currently unconsidered assumptions in this model cast doubt on the effectiveness of strategies to generate trust, and therein resilience, during acute public health emergencies.

The study of soft power in international relations suffers from a liberal democratic bias. Throughout the literature, liberal concepts and values are assumed to be universal in their appeal. This bias has led scholars to underestimate Russian soft power by instrumentalizing it, that is, to see it purely as the effect of governmentsponsored programs, and to focus solely on the cultural pillar of soft power. This paper argues, alternatively, that Russia's conservative values and illiberal governance models generate admiration and followership, even outside of what Russia claims to be its post-Soviet sphere of influence. Crucially, this admiration and followership perform the traditional function of soft power: generating support for controversial Russian foreign policy decisions. Admitting that soft power can be based on conservative values is necessary not only to understand Russia's foreign policy potential, but also the ability of non-Western states to successfully challenge the Western liberal order.

In recent years, INGO legitimacy has been subject to growing scrutiny from analysts and practitioners alike. Critics have highlighted a backlash against INGOs in the Global South, a growing mismatch between INGO capacities and contemporary global challenges, and diminishing support for norms such as democracy and human rights that underpin INGOs' work. Although these problems have attracted significant attention within the academic literature, this article argues that existing explorations of INGO legitimacy have broadly conformed either to a top-down approach focused on global norms and institutions or a bottom-up approach focused on the local dynamics surrounding states and populations in the Global South. We suggest that this divide is unhelpful for understanding the current predicament and propose a new approach, which pays closer attention to the interaction between bottom-up and top-down dimensions, and to historical context. This new approach can provide important insights into current debates about the future roles and internal structures of INGOs.Résumé La légitimité des ONGI est de plus en plus remise en question par les analystes et praticiens. Les critiques ont fait la lumière sur les réactions hostiles que soulèvent les ONGI dans les pays du Sud, l'écart grandissant entre les capacités des ONGI et les défis mondiaux de l'heure et le respect de moins en moins grand des normes sous-jacentes au travail des ONGI, dont la démocratie et les droits de l'homme. Même si ces problèmes ont été largement traités dans la documentation spécialisée, cet article avance que les recherches existantes sur la légitimité des Resumen En años recientes, la legitimidad de las organizaciones no gubernamentales internacionales (INGO, por sus siglas en inglés) ha estado sujeta a un creciente escrutinio de analistas y profesionales. Los críticos han destacado una reacción violenta contra las INGO en el Hemisferio Sur, un creciente desequilibrio entre las capacidades de las INGO y los desafíos mundiales contemporáneos, y un apoyo decreciente de las normas, tales como la democracia y los derechos humanos que apoyan la labor de las INGO. Aunque estos problemas han atraído una importante atención dentro del material académico publicado, el presente artículo argumenta que las exploraciones existentes de la legitimidad de las INGO se han ajustado ampliamente a un enfoque de arriba a abajo centrado en las normas e instituciones mundiales o en un enfoque de abajo a arriba centrado en la dinámica social que rodea a los estados y poblaciones en el Hemisferio Sur. Sugerimos que esta división no ayuda a la comprensión del dilema actual y proponemos un nuevo enfoque, que presta una más estrecha atención a la interacción entre las dimensiones de abajo a arriba y de arriba a abajo, y al contexto histórico. Este nuevo enfoque puede proporcionar importantes perspectivas en los debates actuales sobre los futuros papeles y estructuras internas de las INGO. Voluntas (2016Voluntas ( ) 27:2764Voluntas ( -2786Voluntas ( 2765 123

Keating, V. C., Ruzicka, J. (2014). Trusting relationships in international politics: No need to hedge. Review of International Studies, 40 (4), 753-770.How can trusting relationships be identified in international politics? The recent wave of scholarship on trust in International Relations answers this question by looking for one or the combination of three indicators - the incidence of cooperation; discourses expressing trust; or the calculated acceptance of vulnerability. These methods are inadequate both theoretically and empirically. Distinguishing between the concepts of trust and confidence, we instead propose an approach that focuses on the actors' hedging strategies. We argue that actors either declining to adopt or removing hedging strategies is a better indicator of a trusting relationship than the alternatives. We demonstrate the strength of our approach by showing how the existing approaches would suggest the US-Soviet relationship to be trusting when it was not so. In contrast, the US-Japanese alliance relationship allows us to show how we can identify a developing trusting relationship.authorsversionPeer reviewe