It is a strange and almost embarrassing fact that most of us will live and die without ever having had a proper conversation with the majority of people who shape our lives.

The grocer who quietly keeps us fed. The bus driver who gets us to work. The construction worker who builds our homes and infrastructure.
The nurse's aide who cares for the elderly or sick in our communities. The librarian who curates knowledge and provides a community space. The protester we see in the street, whose cause we never quite took the time to understand. These are not enemies. But nor, for the most part, are they friends. They are something far more mysterious: strangers with whom we share a political destiny.

This is where the idea of political friendship becomes both unsettling and beautiful. For it asks us to reimagine friendship—not as affinity, not as affection, but as a deliberate commitment to strangers, made not out of sentiment, but out of respect for the conditions of peace.
Political friendship is not about liking each other. It is about staying with each other, especially when it would be easier not to.

The philosopher Aristotle, when he spoke of political friendship, did not mean brunch companions or holiday card lists. He meant something sterner, and more demanding: a commitment to the good of the other, because their good is tangled up with our own. He recognized that cities are not made of buildings or borders, but of relationships—fragile webs of trust, loyalty, and the will to keep going, together.

In our modern world, such trust can seem absurd. We are encouraged to find our tribe, to avoid difficult people, to block, unfriend, cancel. We are told that politics is war, and that strangers are threats to be managed, not companions to be befriended.

But peace (I mean the real deal peace) is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of relationship, even among those who disagree. It is what happens when we look at the stranger across the table, not with suspicion, but with the difficult generosity of curiosity.
Political friendship begins when we agree to stay in the room.

Solidarity, then, is the emotional infrastructure that allows this kind of friendship to endure. It is what we practice when we show up for someone whose pain is not our own, but whose dignity matters to us nonetheless. It is what makes us march for the rights of workers we will never meet, or vote to protect refugees we may never see. It is not charity. It is not pity. It is the recognition that none of us can live well when others are abandoned.

In the context of peacebuilding, these ideas are not luxuries. They are the raw material of a different variety of politics that knows that justice cannot be engineered without empathy, and that laws will not hold if they are not also held together by shared feeling. Political friendship among strangers is not a utopia. It is a strategy for survival. It is also a daily choice. It happens when a mother in a war-torn village shares food with a displaced neighbor. When an activist listens—truly listens—to someone who once fought for the other side. When a policymaker writes a law not to please her base, but to prevent the next cycle of violence.

These acts are not dramatic. But they are revolutionary.

And yet we should not be naive. Political friendship will not solve all conflicts. Solidarity will not dissolve all hate. But they will allow us to keep trying, without needing to erase our differences. They give us the courage to coexist without collapsing into silence or revenge.

We often imagine that peace will come from treaties, or reforms, or charismatic leaders. But it is just as likely to come from small, slow commitments: listening more than we speak. Admitting we were wrong. Refusing to humiliate. Defending the rights of those we do not understand. Practicing hospitality in our politics.

In this light, political friendship is not merely an ethical ideal. It is the daily miracle of a society still willing to hold itself together—one thread of solidarity at a time.

And perhaps, in this fractured world, the most radical act of all is to make friends with a stranger not because they are like us, but because they are not like us. And yet, we are willing to stand with them anyway.