This article examines how trust influences intelligence cooperation in the EU, suggesting its critical importance.
Trust is one of the foremost conditions for international intelligence cooperation, yet it has seldom been operationalized in this context. Using a conceptual framework derived from interorganizational relations and sociological institutionalism, this article critically examines how trust influences EU intelligence cooperation. It concludes that trust plays a far bigger role in international intelligence cooperation than scholars and practitioners often assume. In the EU intelligence system, trust positively influences cooperation, mainly through goodwill and on a personal level. A shared occupational culture and collective identity within the European intelligence community provide an efficient basis for trust-based cooperation. By adopting a sociological approach, this article offers a more nuanced, multi-level understanding of the role of trust in international intelligence cooperation.
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Pepijn Tuinier (2026) studied this question.
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