Friendship and International Relations

Every form of social community involves friendship. When we look around, international politics presents us with numerous examples. We may cite the 'Franco-German friendship', the Anglo-American 'special relationship', and the former 'Sino-Soviet friendship'. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 proclaimed 'sincere Amity' among its signatories. Furthermore, the UN Charta is dedicated to promote 'friendly relations among nations'. While we find many instances of friendship discourse in international politics we know remarkably little about them. How can we conceptualize and study friendship in international relations? How is international friendship practiced and what empirical cases exist? This edited volume puts forward the argument that international friendship is a distinct type of interstate and international relationship, and that as such, it can contribute to capture aspects of international politics that have long remained unattended. To this end, Simon Koschut and Andrea Oelsner offer a framework for analyzing friendship in international politics by presenting a variety of conceptual approaches and empirical cases of international friendship.

Simon Koschut is Assistant Professor in International Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Previously, he was a Fritz Thyssen fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Review of International Studies, and Cooperation and Conflict.

Andrea Oelsner is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. She is the author of International Relations in Latin America (2005). Her publications appeared in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Security Dialogue, International Politics, and International Studies Quarterly, among others.