Friendship among nations

In this engaging and detailed book, Evgeny Roshchin explores the conceptual history and genealogy of friendship in diplomacy and international relations. It is a timely, insightful and interesting addition to the literature. Drawing on political and diplomatic texts from the ancient Greeks and Romans through the Middle Ages to the modern day, Roschin takes a constructivist and contextualist approach to his subject. Through a genealogy of friendship, he looks simultaneously at the evolution of the concept and its varied linguistic meanings, as well as at the wider context and shifting landscapes—intellectually, politically, legally and socially—in which it has been used. The book articulates how friendship can serve useful performative, political and pragmatic roles between states and those acting on their behalf. In so doing, Roshchin challenges inherent suspicions and limitations within International Relations towards the concept. Friendship in contemporary discussions is often associated with moral or normative understandings of its meaning, yet the author argues that a rupture in how friendship has historically been conceptualized has led to an insufficient understanding and appreciation of its more varied and pragmatic roles, purposes and impacts within contemporary diplomatic practice

Aesthetics · Context (archaeology · Diplomacy · Epistemology · Friendship · Greeks · Meaning (existential · Normative · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Regional Socio-Economic Development Trends