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 is Director of Practice at The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Dr. Devere is founding co-editor of AMITY: The Journal of Friendship Studies. She has published widely on issues related to peace, social justice, ethics of care, women’s studies, refugee resettlement, peace journalism, peace education and citizenship, including the co-edited books Peacebuilding and the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (with Dr. John Synott and Dr. Kelli Te Maihāroa) and The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity (with Professor Preston King).

John von Heyking is Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, where he teaches political philosophy and religion and politics. He is author of Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (2001) and coeditor of Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought (2008) and Civil Religion in Political Thought (2010) as well as of two volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.