My paper explores how friendship can help us rethink two core concepts in international politics: security and power. It first discusses the relevance of friendship as a process providing ontological security to actors, including states, and differentiates this from the function of both strategic alliances and security communities. Building on this reading the paper then explores the ways power operates in and out of friendship. Specifically, it looks at the power operating ‘internally’ that is, among friends, and ‘externally’, that is, how practices of friendship affect third parties and international order. It suggests that friends exercise power through mutual empowerment, by providing each other with ontological security, and through agenda setting in building international order. This power is both creative and exclusionary in character. Taken together, the paper helps us to see that friendship is not a loveliest but must be understood as a political relationship.
