Alireza Eshraghi
How can people build community and bring about change when societies are polarized and trust is in short supply? And can systems that people have no confidence in be changed from within?
Alireza Eshraghi's Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship
Beyond Trust: Building Community and Collective Action in an Age of Uncertainty
As a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, Alireza Eshraghi is pursuing a question that reaches well beyond any single country: how can communities hold together and act together when trust is in short supply? Across the world, the ground beneath collective life is shifting, he says. Confidence in institutions, media, experts, and even in one another is eroding, and social media can dissolve years of patient community-building in a matter of hours. For the civil society leaders, peacebuilders and organizers Eshraghi has worked with in more than forty countries, the old foundations of bringing people together – shared narratives, institutional legitimacy, interpersonal trust – can no longer be taken for granted.
What can work when trust is missing?
Rather than asking how to restore trust, Eshraghi intends to research what forms of solidarity and common action are possible even without trust. Can people only build on trust, or could trust emerge as a result rather than a prerequisite when other factors are at play. What can work even without trust: what allows coalitions to form, movements to sustain themselves, and communities to act once the certainty that underpinned cooperation is gone? Can guarded alliances – tactical, interest-based, honest about their limits – be an answer to the lack of trust?
Why Germany?
Eshraghi is drawn to the two ruptures of Germany's recent history: the rebuilding of society after 1945, and the upheaval of reunification after 1989. Both were moments when a society had to remake the basis on which people lived and worked together, he says. After 1945, a country discredited by dictatorship and war had to construct democratic institutions and a new civic consensus. After 1989, two populations shaped by different political systems and cultures had to grow together. In both cases, trust between people and in institutions had to be built, or rebuilt, under pressure. Eshraghi wants to understand how that happened, how far it succeeded, and where it did not. And what, if anything, might transfer to other societies facing their own crises of cohesion today?
As a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, Eshraghi aims to pursue these questions within broader debates on democracy, technology, and collective futures, and through exchange grounded in real experience.