Description
Departing from the literature on emotions in IR (Solomon 2014, 2018; Ross 2014; Koschut 2014, 2020; Koschut et al. 2017; Hutchinson and Bleiker 2014; Pace and Bilgic 2019) and the definition of emotional communities by Rosenwein (2007) and Gürkan and Terzi (2024), this paper focuses on the emotion of friendship in international organizations. Friendship has stirred the hearts and minds of philosophers such as Aristotle or Kant and it immersed in the International Relations discipline with the pioneering studies by Kristin Haugevik (2018) or Felix Berenskoetter (2007). In this paper I seek to theorize the nexus between friendship as an emotion and ontological security theory. I start from the assumption that agents cannot know whether they are ontologically secure or not if they do not ‘feel’ it, so ontological security translates into emotions, symbols, diplomatic narratives and relationships between states.
First, I argue that friendship plays a significant role in ontological security theory. By building safety, trust and emotional stability, friendship enables agents to feel secure in time and space. Second, I argue that in collectives, friendship generates hope, which is a premise for the attainment of the nexus between friendship and ontological security.
I make several contributions. First, I trace theoretical roots of friendship in philosophy, offering, first, a comparative perspective on friendship in the work of Aristotle and Kant, and then discussing contemporary works on friendship in IR. Second, I theorize the nexus between friendship and ontological security theory, framing friendship as both a site of hope and stabilisator in political collectives. Empirically, I provide a case study of friendship in NATO collective actor responses following Russia’s invasion in Ukraine.
