Evgeny Roshchin: Friendship Among Nations: A History of a Concept

Book Review by Lisa Gibson

Evgeny Roshchin: Friendship Among Nations: A History of a Concept. Manchester University Press, 2017. ISBN: 9781526116444

Gibson, L. (2018) Review of Friendship Among Nations: A History of a Concept by Evgeny Roshchin. AMITY: The Journal of Friendship Studies, 5:1, pp. 27-29. doi: 10.5518/AMITY/25

Abstract

Friendship Among Nations invites the reader to take a journey through the long legacy of contractual friendship agreements and the role they have played in international relations. This book draws upon history of concepts and international political theory to explore the role of friendship in voluntary contractual agreements between states. This is a perspective which has been neglected in the fairly recent re-emergence of scholarship on friendships in politics and international relations. Roshchin does an excellent job of setting the stage for this book by discussing some of the most prevalent discourses around friendship in international relations, in particular the scholarship that explores political friendship as analogous to personal friendship and which focuses on the moral and ethical obligations of friendship. He contends that this normative view of friendship has become central to the current political views on friendship especially since modernity.