Description
Friendship is an important and understudied phenomenon in international politics. Drawing on Aristotle’s conception of character friendship this article argues that friendship is a form of international association that impacts the foreign policy process through making certain courses of action appear self-evidently appropriate and others unthinkable. This limits the options available to policymakers. Friendship emerges when a state comes to see itself in another and this creates obligations to provide supererogatory levels of support and attention to the actor that has been subject positioned as a friend. The imagined similarity that underpins friendship is discursively constructed by the befriending state. In exploring how friendship emerges in international politics, it follows the logic of securitization and argues that a process of amitization occurs through which policy-makers and public negotiate the construction of affective ties, coming to recognize specified states as Other Selves. Theis article centres on how the United States has come to view specified actors as “friends” worthy of supererogatory support. However, theorising friendship through Aristotle’s conception of friends as other selves opens up wider conversations about the geographic boundaries of friendship and the extent to which these ideas and processes travel and are applicable globally or regionally.
