I want to talk about someone very dear to me who I know was dear to many readers of this blog too, the feminist international legal scholar, Karen Knop. Since Karen’s death more than three years ago, there have been several festschrifts, a conference in Karen’s honor, and many moving testimonials. But I want to talk about something a little different here— what I learned from Karen about the power and meaning of friendship.  What I’m suggesting is this: The friendships we cultivate across borders of all kinds are lived infrastructure for peace.

Friendship has no designated place in international law.  Our frame of reference as international lawyers often leads us to see only state actions, managed by technical experts, and then, perhaps, the equally strategic actions of certain categories of non-state actors such as NGOs. 

So much so that in a recent New York Times op-ed , Hillary Clinton and Keren Yarhi-Milo condemn “The Perils of Getting Too Personal in Foreign Policy.”  Strategy, not “chemistry between leaders” should be the basis for diplomacy, they argue.

But feminist understandings of friendship have much to teach international lawyers about how to navigate the borders between us.

My Friend Karen

For 15 years, Karen and I researched and wrote together. We had different expertise, and we had very different strengths as scholars. Karen was rock solid in her doctrinal knowledge and wore her scholarly humility as a vocation. She couldn’t make any assertion without checking the facts and the law three times and reading and citing absolutely everything written by absolutely everyone on the subject. Even her emails were an art form of careful, thoughtful prose, cleverly knitting together ideas and reflections to the reader’s tastes and needs. When the chips were down, it was usually Karen who showed courage—willing to go for it, make the big claim, stand up to the intellectual status quo. Karen could also be wittingly cutting off our critics. “Aargh! Another dopey reading of our paper,” a typical Karen email read, sending along some comments from a colleague, before tasking herself with some further research to respond to the critiques. 

We had so much fun. I admired Karen’s curious perspective on ideas and the world, and the way she could pull it all off with such avant-garde, effortless elegance. We worked on drafts and presented papers in cities like Seoul, Tokyo, Boston, Toronto, Melbourne, Paris and Las Vegas. The choice of locale usually turned on Karen’s carefully researched investigation of culinary options, of galleries and small shops filled with beautiful or strange objects, or someone brilliant or amusing to converse with. Karen delighted in the off-symmetrical beauty of persons and things, the quirky courage of an argument, the clever deliciousness of a sauce, the feel of a fabric, the challenging intersubjective temporality of intellectual struggle with ideas not yet formed. She would take it all in, with deep reverence for the quirkiness and a sharp eye for the the absurd lurking in the everyday. 

It was a period of extraordinary productivity for us as scholars.  Karen and I wrote about some serious topics: how to repair the enduring intergenerational wounds of female sexual slavery in military conflicts, how to navigate cultural differences when it comes to feminist values, and even the unintended negative consequences of feminist diplomacy.  In collaboration with Ralf Michaels, we also wrote about feminist theory, international law in domestic courts, and conflict of laws.  Yet this was possible because the friendship was an end in itself, indeed, the ultimate end. 

Over the years, we developed a shared shorthand vocabulary. We pulled each other out of those dark places any human being finds themselves in from time to time. A conversation about the annoyances of our institutions invariably turned headaches into humor. Plenty of times, we got frustrated with each other. Always, we held things for each other—whether intellectual or personal. Together, we made discoveries that neither could have achieved on her own. Although I miss her, I feel her presence still, smiling that wry smile, urging me on.  Our friendship now has to navigate a new border—the border between life and death.

The Power of Friendship in International Law

In the world of international law, history is full of famous examples of friendship across borders that changed the world. The personal relationship between then U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was instrumental in the largest nuclear disarmament in history.

But just as important but perhaps less often noticed are the personal friendships between the many anonymous protagonists in border conflicts—between soldiers and civilians in occupied zones, between bureaucrats in foreign ministries who negotiate agreements, between scientists, defense analysts, or journalists who choose to share information across national divisions or not. Leaning into our friendships, spending time with people we enjoy on the other side of the borders in our lives, and learning from them, is a powerful way to tend to your borders.

In this context, what feminists know about friendship has a lot to teach international law. For example:

Most people think building peace across our divides requires big compromise. Giving up justice, for the sake of the peace, as so many victims of sexual violence in conflict zones are forced to do.  Give up on territory for the sake of ending the aggression. Living in the Muddling Middle.

But the best relationships begin by respecting, and then learning from, one another’s borders and boundaries.

Why Friendship now?

The feminist anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has traced how friendship emerged in Euro-American thought as a relationship of free choice—unlike kinship, which we’re born into. What makes friendship powerful, Strathern argues, is that it gets its energy from crossing difference and boundaries. The more difference a friendship must overcome, the more patience, persistence, and curiosity it requires. But it also generates more force.

This was true for Karen and me. She was Canadian, rural, Danish-connected; I was American, rooted in France and Japan. We had different scholarly strengths, different temperaments. Our friendship crossed those borders—literally and intellectually. And that crossing made the work we did together possible in ways neither of us could have achieved alone.

At a moment when institutions have fractured and people have lost trust in media, schools, and universities, friends have become one of the primary sources of what we learn and how we change. When people encounter difference through friendship—real people, not abstractions—minds actually shift. That’s how culture changes.

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I certainly share Clinton and Yarhi-Milo’s concerns about President Trump’s cavalier personal approach to diplomacy.  But what I learned from being friends with Karen, and from all the feminist research in international law we were able to do as friends, is this: technocratic strategy built on states’ interests run by bureaucracies also has its limits.  And when we hit those limits, friendship can often accomplish what state-centered diplomacy cannot. Friendship, as much as international law, can be a powerful practice of peace.

This essay is part of a series on Navigating the Borders Between us.  For more detail, plus methodology workshops, interviews with change-makers and webinars, visit the Everyday Ambassador project at anneliseriles.substack.com.