In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the connection between friendship and politics. As a result, a body of work is now emerging which treats friendship as a term which can be used by those engaged in political analysis treating friendship in its analytical, descriptive, and normative dimensions. The purpose of this paper is to consider the conceptualisation of friendship itself. This examination is in two parts. The first concerns what will be shown to be two fallacies concerning the relationship and use of friendship as a political term: (1) that friendship has no role to play, and has no place in our political lexicon; and (2) that when friendship is evoked it must be understood figuratively. The second part focuses on the possibility of developing ‘friendship’ in political analysis. Here it is proposed that we focus on two related concerns: (1) what can be understood when we consider the meaning of friendship; and (2) what we are doing when we locate friendship in the world of politics. In terms of (1) it is argued here that we should resist attempting to reduce ‘friendship’ to any single and exclusive essence. Instead, we should think of ‘friendship’ as indicating a variety of overlapping concerns which coalesce around a set of core features and concerns. In terms of (2) it is argued that when we locate friendship as a phenomena or practice we need not be restricted by a fixed or core example. Thus, we would we expect to locate a variety of phenomena and practices which can be described as friendships. Moreover, we might do well to treat being a friend and friendship not as a state, but as an activity. In this sense, friendship can be thought of as a set of interactions at a variety of levels over time. The paper concludes by arguing that in both theory and practice we can expect to discover varieties of friendship. What the scholar of friendship should be concerned with is to identify the understanding and phenomena of friendship in their own location, to show how this form of friendship operates and how it helps to shape and explain what is seen, and to show how this form of friendship has a relationship with not only other forms of friendship, but other political phenomena and ideas. Such an approach turns our focus away from the notion of the friend and friendship as a state, and encourages us attentive to the acts of being a friend, and the process of friendship. The importance of friendship is thus shown in its ability to locate a field of concern – the question of what binds person to person and group to group – and to use that concern to highlight what other modes of analysis cast into relief.