Friendship and the world of states

Smith, Graham M.

doi:10.1057/ip.2010.35

Cited by 32 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Third, interpersonal connection can develop over time into political friendship founded on emotional and intellectual connection, trust, and respect (see Costigliola, ; van Hoef, ; Smith, ). This form of friendship is defined as strategic, rather than normative or built on shared values or worldviews (Oelsner & Koschut, , p. 3).…”

Section: Conceptualizing the Relationship Between Individual And Statmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal and Political Emotions in the Mind of the Diplomat

Keys

Yorke

2019

Political Psychology

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Despite growing research on the role of emotions in international relations, little work has analyzed how diplomats and decision-makers themselves make sense of feelings generated by relationships that have both individual and state-level implications. Do diplomats consciously experience feelings on behalf of the state? If so, how? How might individual embodied emotions affect how diplomats carry out their roles during negotiations?In the first systematic effort to address and conceptualize these questions empirically, with Henry Kissinger as a case study, we investigate the interplay between the experience of being an individual with personal emotions, on the one hand, and the practice of evaluating performative emotional cues relevant to the state, on the other. We suggest that diplomats recognize some emotional inputs as accruing not to them as individuals but to the state they represent, typically in connection with traditional diplomatic protocols and rituals that are firmly established as state-level performances. At the same time, however, especially but not exclusively in high-stakes negotiations involving strong personal relationships, individually embodied feelings with little-to-no state relevance can have significant influence on how diplomats define and pursue the national interest.Scholarly interest in the role of emotions in international relations often runs up against a conceptual problem: Who exactly is experiencing the emotions? Scholars, like journalists, diplomats, and the public, often write of states as though they were people with human emotions: Japan was offended, Israel feared, the United States was angry. Many scholars view such characterizations as a useful shorthand or metaphor, rather than a claim that states have feelings. Most would probably agree that it is individuals who have feelings that can be experienced collectively or assigned to the state, but very little sustained conceptual or empirical work has probed how individuals might experience state emotions.This article offers an exploratory analysis of how diplomats and leaders make sense of feelings that have both individual and state-level implications. Do diplomats and leaders believe that they feel on behalf of the state? If so, how do they perceive those feelings? And what are the implications of the way they assign emotions for the perceptions, judgments, and the conduct of diplomacy? In the first systematic effort to conceptualize these questions using empirical evidence, we investigate the interplay between the experience of being an individual with personal emotions, on the one hand, and the practice of generating and receiving state-level emotional cues, on the other. Focusing on bs_bs_banner

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Section: Conceptualizing the Relationship Between Individual And Statmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal and Political Emotions in the Mind of the Diplomat

Keys

Yorke

2019

Political Psychology

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“…82 At first glance at least, three issues tend to bedevil the literature: (1) it is unclear to which interactants 'political friendship' refers; they could be entities such as states, civil society associations and social movements and/or the personal bonds that are forged within their contexts. Sometimes it is all of the above, 83 at other times no specific actors are discernible 84 ; (2) the Aristotelean notion of philia, a mainstay as a springboard for discussion, 85 even when narrowed to philia politike, is problematic because (a) philia has such an extensive semantic scope that it is able to include any kind of relationship of good will and (b) because it only pertained to the male elite of the Greek city states. 86 Philia politike can thus only be marshalled in modern context at the price of ahistoricism unless extraordinary circumspection is exercised in its transfer to modern social relations.…”

Section: Kracauer In the Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Siegfried Kracauer's Differentiating Approach to Friendship

Blatterer

2018

J Historical Sociology

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Siegfried Kracauer's essays Über die Freundschaft (‘On Friendship’) and Gedanken über Freundschaft (‘Thoughts on Friendship’) exemplify a conceptually differentiating approach to friendship. This article aims at highlighting the explanatory yield of such an approach in contrast to a prevalent conflation of personal relationship types in research today. Kracauer's work is a call from the past to take seriously the semantic nuances of friendship in the present in order to better reflect lived experience in a sociologically plausible manner. I begin by identifying the practice of semantic conflation and its methodological problems. A brief description of the publication background of the friendship essays and their embeddedness in Kracauer's anxiety about the modern subject precedes a selective exposition. To conclude, I offer a summary reflection on the contemporary significance of Kracauer's approach with reference to social media friends and political friendship.

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“…While in established approaches friendship is often viewed in instrumental cost-benefit utility-maximizing terms, this is not how people generally relate to friendship at an individual level, where it instead holds deep emotional significance. Indeed, as Cicero put it: ‘if the mutual love of friends were to be removed from the world, there is no single house, no single state that would go on existing’ (quoted in Smith, 2011: 13). Explicitly linking friendship to ontological security Berenskoetter (2010) therefore views ‘friendship as a particular and morally significant relationship … [that] … strengthens moral certainty and the sense of what is “the right thing to do”… friendship matters because it moulds and reinforces “identity”, or the sense of Self’.…”

Section: Ontological Security the Self And Subjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ontological security, self-articulation and the securitization of identity

Browning¹,

Joenniemi²

2016

Cooperation and Conflict

174

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The concept of ontological security has made increasing headway within International Relations, in particular through its ability to offer alternative explanations of the forces underpinning security dilemmas and conflict in world politics. While welcoming the insights already provided by its application, this article argues that the concept's use to date has been too much geared to questions of identity-related stability, with change viewed as disturbing and anxiety-inducing. In contrast, the article calls for a more open understanding that: (i) links ontological security to reflexivity and avoids collapsing together the concepts of self, identity and ontological security; (ii) avoids privileging securitization over desecuritization as a means for generating ontological security; and (iii) opens out the concept beyond a narrow concern with questions of conflict and the conduct of violence more towards the theorization of positive change.

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Friendship and the world of states

Cited by 32 publications

References 16 publications

Personal and Political Emotions in the Mind of the Diplomat

Personal and Political Emotions in the Mind of the Diplomat

Siegfried Kracauer's Differentiating Approach to Friendship

Ontological security, self-articulation and the securitization of identity

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