International Friendship and the Trusting Disposition

• In Event: Conceptualizing the Friendly Voice: How to Achieve Peace Through Amicable Communication?

Abstract

Rather than questions about what friendship is, what friendship is for, or what friendship does, this paper seeks to discuss how 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. These enactments are channeled through verbal and non-verbal communication, and this paper explores how practices are communicated and become internalised. To this end, the paper moves from the more general to the more particular. This introduction makes a few broad observations on the development of the international friendship literature. Section two reviews what it implies to study international political friendship in terms of our beliefs about the nature of reality and social facts. The next section zooms in to focus on friendship in IR, discusses the notions of social practice and logic of practicality, and argues that international friendship is a social practice imbued with trust, which itself can take many forms and appear in different areas of international social life. The fourth section offers some reflections on trust and how it can be understood as a pre-rational, pre-cognitive emotion. As this is work in progress, rather than presenting answers the concluding section openly exposes some unresolved questions and difficulties that are posed by attempting to study the practices of international friendship as imbued in a trusting disposition.

Author

• Andrea Oelsner, U of Aberdeen