Friendship Studies: Politics and Practices

This anthology brings together scholarship in the field of Friendship Studies.

In recent decades, friendship has been a site of analysis for understanding the connections between people and groups, and as a fabric for holding the political and social together. Starting with the theoretical debates about how to conceptualize friendship as a political idea, the anthology then looks at friendship's relationship with justice, the state, and civic relations. The collection presents cutting-edge research which moves the theorization of friendship beyond western confines to consider the themes in cross-cultural and decolonized contexts.

Graham M. Smith is Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Leeds. He has a special interest in friendship and has published on the topic in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Political Studies Review, and International Politics. He is the author of Friendship and the Political (Imprint Academic, 2011). Heather Devere’s research in the fields of politics, ethics, peace and conflict, and friendship studies spans several decades. Until recently she was Director of Practice at Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa (National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies) at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand. She writes regularly on the politics of friendship, is founding co-editor of AMITY: The Journal of Friendship Studies (with Graham M. Smith and Preston King) and has edited several books with other scholars that include The Palgrave Handbook of Positive Peace (2022), Decolonising Peace and Conflict Studies (2022), Peacebuilding and the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (2017), and The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity (2000). John von Heyking is Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge (Canada), where he teaches political philosophy. He is author of Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship (2018), The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (2016), and Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (2001). He has coedited numerous volumes including two volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin and, most recently, Where from Does History Emerge?: Inquiries in Political Cosmogony (2020).

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