That’s not really what research on state formation has found. The basic definition of a state is “a centralized government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force”, and as you might expect from the definition, groups generally attain statehood by monopolizing the use of force. In other words, they are the bandits that become big enough that nobody dares oppose them. They attain statehood through what’s effectively a peace treaty, when all possible opposition basically says “okay, we’re submit to your jurisdiction, please stop killing us”. Very often, it actually is a literal peace treaty.
States will often co-opt existing trust networks as a way to enhance and maintain their legitimacy, as with Constantine’s adoption of Christianity to preserve social cohesion in the Roman Empire, or all the compromises that led the 13 original colonies to ratify the U.S. constitution in the wake of the American Revolution. But violence comes first, then statehood, then trust.
Attempts to legislate trust don’t really work. Trust is an emotion, it operates person-to-person, and saying “oh, you need to trust such-and-such” don’t really work unless you are trusted yourself.
> The basic definition of a state is “a centralized government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force
I'm not saying otherwise (I've even referred to this in a later comment).
> But violence comes first, then statehood, then trust.
Nobody said anything about the historical process so you're not contradicting anyone.
> Attempts to legislate trust don’t really work
Quite the opposite, it works very, very well. Civil laws and jurisdiction on contracts have existed since the Roman Republic, and every society has some equivalent (you should read about how the Taliban could get back to power so quickly in big part because they kept doing civil justice in the rural afghan society even while the country was occupied by the US coalition).
You must have institutions to be sure than the other party is going to respect the contract, so that you don't have to trust them, you just need to trust that the state is going to enforce that contract (what they can do because they have the monopoly of violence and can just force the party violating the contract into submission).
With the monopoly of violence comes the responsibility to use your violence to enforce contracts, otherwise social structures are going to collapse (and someone else is going to take that job from you, and gone is your monopoly of violence)
States will often co-opt existing trust networks as a way to enhance and maintain their legitimacy, as with Constantine’s adoption of Christianity to preserve social cohesion in the Roman Empire, or all the compromises that led the 13 original colonies to ratify the U.S. constitution in the wake of the American Revolution. But violence comes first, then statehood, then trust.
Attempts to legislate trust don’t really work. Trust is an emotion, it operates person-to-person, and saying “oh, you need to trust such-and-such” don’t really work unless you are trusted yourself.