DESCRIPTION
Recent global political changes mean that European militaries need to change their focus from mainly peacekeeping missions to getting ready for potential war. This also means they have to adjust how they train their personnel to work with local populations and communities during these situations.
In peacekeeping situations, it is often possible to develop lasting relationships with certain individuals, which helps build trust and rapport over time. In war scenarios, however, military personnel usually need to gather actionable intelligence from unknown individuals who might not trust a foreign military organisation and who may have different cultural norms.
It is critical that the military is able to elicit accurate intelligence to help avoid civilian casualties and to ensure adherence to its moral and ethical obligations.
This internship, and potentially an associated BSc thesis, starts to explore 1) how the military can help to prepare their personnel to build rapport and trust under these challenging conditions, and 2) how the military can best evaluate the accuracy of the information they receive.
Keywords
Human intelligence; military operations; rapport; trust; information elicitation.
Research question
Potential research questions are e.g.,
- How does the amount of trust in a (military) organisation impact relationship building with an individual from that organisation?
- What is the impact of hostile symbolism on military vehicles on the development of trust and rapport between people?
- How do cultural expectations about non-verbal behaviour affect relationships?
- How can people gathering intelligence in war contexts evaluate the accuracy of the information received?
TYPE OF Research
For example: Online or in-person experiments. Quantitative or Qualitative.
DATA-ANALySIS
The quantitative data of this study will be analysed by quantitative data analysis programmes such as R.
INFORMATION
Please contact Lynn Weiher (l.weiher@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. The assignment is open to one student.
Literature
- Hope, L., Surmon-Böhr, F., Alison, L., & Alison, E. (2024). Time Sensitive Interviews with Suspects, Witnesses, and Informants: Challenges and Opportunities. Journal of Applied Operational Intelligence, 1(1), 5-29. https://doi.org/10.5750/jaoi.v1i1.2278
- Hope, L., Hawkins de Namor, N., Gabbert, F., Ferenczi, N., & Oxburgh, G. (2025). From an investigator’s perspective: challenges and opportunities in building and maintaining rapport in cross-cultural investigative interviewing contexts. Journal of Criminal Psychology, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print). https://doi.org/10.1108/JCP-11-2024-0123
- Buehler, A., E., O. G., Peter, Z., Gerd-Dieter, W., & and Wesemann, U. (2019, 2019/01/02). Challenges for Research into Military Investigations. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 26(1), 50-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/13218719.2018.1482575
- de Bruïne, G., Vredeveldt, A., & van Koppen, P. J. (2025). The way we remember and report: an experiment testing cultural differences in eyewitness memory. Memory, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2025.2505213