This is the first book-length study of the role that friendship plays in diplomacy and international politics. Through an examination of a vast amount of sources ranging from diplomatic letters and bilateral treaties, to poems and philosophical treatises, it analyses how friendship has been talked about and practised in pre-modern political orders and modern systems of international relations. The study highlights how instrumental friendship was for describing and legitimising a range of political and legal engagements with foreign countries and nations. It emphasises contractual and political aspects in diplomatic friendship based on the idea of utility. It is these functions of the concept that help the world stick together when collective institutions are either embryonic or no more. -- .

This is the first book-length study of the role that friendship plays in diplomacy and international politics. Through an examination of a vast amount of sources ranging from diplomatic letters and bilateral treaties, to poems and philosophical treatises, it analyses how friendship has been talked about and practised in pre-modern political orders and modern systems of international relations. The study highlights how instrumental friendship was for describing and legitimising a range of political and legal engagements with foreign countries and nations. It emphasises contractual and political aspects in diplomatic friendship based on the idea of utility. It is these functions of the concept that help the world stick together when collective institutions are either embryonic or no more. -- .

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Conference on AElectronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia, EGOSE 2018, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in November 2018. The 36 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 98 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on smart city infrastructure, policy; digital privacy, rights,security;data science, machine learning, algorithms, computational linguistics; digital public administration, economy, policy; digital services, values, inclusion; digital democracy, participation, security, communities, social media, activism; social media discourse analysis; digital data, policy modeling; digital government, administration, communication.