Confidence-building measures

Confidence-building measures (CBMs) or confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs) are actions taken to reduce fear of attack by both (or more) parties in a situation of conflict. The term is most often used in the context of armed conflict, but is similar in logic to that of trust and interpersonal communication used to reduce conflictual situations among human individuals.

History

Embassies and people to people contacts

Confidence-building measures between sovereign states for many centuries included the existence of and increased activities by embassies, which are state institutions geographically located inside the territory of other states, staffed by people expected to have extremely good interpersonal skills who can explain and resolve misunderstandings due to differences in language and culture which are incorrectly perceived as threatening, or encourage local knowledge of a foreign culture by funding artistic and cultural activities.

A much more grassroots form of confidence building occurs directly between ordinary people of different states. Short visits by individual children or groups of children to another state, and longer visits (6–12 months) by secondary and tertiary students to another state, have widely been used in the European Union as one of the methods of decreasing the tensions which had earlier led to many centuries of inter-European wars, culminating in the first and second world wars.

Cold War

The use of confidence-building measures (CBMs) as an explicit security management approach emerged from attempts by the Cold War superpowers and their military alliances (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact), as well as the European neutral and non-aligned states, to avoid conventional or nuclear war by accident or miscalculation. The term appears to have been first used in United Nations General Assembly resolution 914 (x) in 1955, prompted by the U.S. "Open Skies" proposal. CBMs became a significant component of arms control during a series of negotiations and agreements produced by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE; which later become the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE) of the early 1970s. CBMs were a major component of the Helsinki Final Act Document (August 1975), the Stockholm CSBM Document (September 1986), and the Vienna Document (November 1990) and its iterations of 1992, 1994, 1999, and 2011. Other CBMs during the Cold War included Latin American joint military manoeuvres and exchanges of military observers, with a meeting on 8 January 1984 of Central American states agreeing to set up a detailed registry of military installations, weapons and personnel and methods of direct communication; and the 1975 Sinai Interim Agreement between Israel and Egypt.