Friendship, Security, and Power

Abstract

Claims of ‘friendship’ and ‘special relationships’ are found regularly in the political discourse, and ‘the friend’ is a commonly used term in the International Relations (IR) literature. And yet, this literature still contains very little substantial thinking about the meaning of friendship. Indeed, with the understanding of friendship in IR still in its infancy, we have difficulties seeing it even when looking at it. The reason is that most thinking in IR continues to build on the liberal ontology of actors as autonomy-seeking entities and is reluctant to conceive of them as social-psychological phenomena.¹ Even among scholars emphasising a social ontology, the Other tends to take on the form of an enemy. Where friendship is discussed, it is done thinly, portraying it as either a mere opposite of enmity or as a label for states forming a ‘security community’ (Adler and Barnett, 1998; Wendt, 1999). Yet friendship is much more than a relationship in which disputes are settled by peaceful means. Thinkers on the topic going back to Aristotle provide us with a rich understanding of friendship as a relationship characterised by trust, openness, honesty, acceptance, reciprocity, solidarity and loyalty (Aristotle, 1999; Fehr, 1996, pp. 3–16). In line with the overall objective of this volume, this chapter attempts to make friendship conceptually intelligible for students and scholars of international politics.