Description
Rather than questions about what international friendship is, what international friendship is for, or what international friendship does, this paper seeks to discuss how international friendship is done. That is, it focuses on the practice of friendship at the international level—on the enactments that allow its production and reproduction. To this end, the paper moves from the more general to the more particular, offering first some reflections about the development of the international friendship literature, followed by a discussion of the implications of studying international political friendship in terms of our understandings about the nature of reality and social facts. Focusing on friendship in IR, the paper argues that the practice of international friendship is a practice imbued with trust, which itself can take many forms and appear in different areas of international social life. In this context, trust is understood as a pre-rational emotion which will allow for a friendship disposition.
