Gender and Confidence Building Measures

One of the most vital conditions for reconciliation is the willingness of different people to trust one another.1 Trust is a social relationship that occurs between individuals, between an individual and a group, and potentially between groups. Trust is also the basis for the social contract between rulers and the ruled, between citizens and the state. Fundamentally, it begins with the experiences of direct interactions. Much like the degrees of reconciliation, there are varying degrees of trust. While the literature on confidence building is vast, there is a lack of literature focused specifically on confidence building and gender. Women must be part of confidence-building measures from the beginning and continue to be an integral part of the process.