This is a study of friendship in international politics. It offers the history of friendship, and shows the role of friendship in building various legal and political orders on both equal and unequal terms. Told through an examination of sources ranging from diplomatic letters and bilateral treaties to poems and philosophical treatises.

Introduction1 The ambivalence of ancient friendship2 Early modern friendship – politics and law 3 The ethics of friendship in early European diplomacy4 Turning friendship into a moral prescription: conceptual change in modernity5 The unknown friendship of modern international ordersConclusionBibliographyIndex

This book examines the role that friendship plays in diplomacy and international politics, analysing how friendship has been practiced in pre-modern political orders and modern systems of international relations. The book highlights how instrumental friendship was for describing and legitimising a range of political and legal engagements with foreign countries and nations. Exploring the contractual and political aspects of diplomatic relationships, Roshchin argues it is these functions of friendship that help the world stick together when collective institutions are either embryonic or no more.The book draws on a contextualist and rhetorical approach developed by Quentin Skinner, offering a conceptual history and genealogy that traces the incremental changes in diplomatic linguistic conventions from the late medieval period to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roshchin argues that contractual friendships were among key diplomatic instruments to maintain the binding character of new political arrangements and, thus, a substitute for a lacking central authority.

‘This investigation is more thorough and far more original than anything else ever written about friendship in diplomacy or, for that matter, in public life.'Nick Onuf, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida International University'This book reconstructs the fascinating history of a neglected concept, and should be read by anyone interested in the history of international thought.'Jens Bartelson, Professor of Political Science at Lund University'A richly detailed, closely argued history of the concept from antiquity to the emergence of the modern era. Roshchin makes a convincing case that a genealogy of this alternative conception of friendship is germane to contemporary debates among International Relations scholars and intellectual historians alike.'Martin J. Burke, The City University of New York and Executive Co-editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas