The abstract of the thesis:

How is radical policy change made possible? How do taboos and norms sometimes weaken or vanish? What makes military violence acceptable for democratic audiences? The dissertation explores these questions from a discourse theoretical perspective, analyzing in detail the changing role of the military in German peace and security policy. It examines the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative.

The dissertation argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad as well as force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that result in different policy options appearing moral, rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on “Essex School” discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable courses of action not just acceptable but at times even seem without alternative.

Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, the dissertation seeks to provide an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, it also demonstrates the benefit of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naïve realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and, if to a lesser extent, International Relations more generally.

The abstract of the thesis:

Right-Wing movements have gained political momentum in the last few decades, drawing within their ranks women who not only embody their exclusionary and violent politics but who also simultaneously contest everyday patriarchies. This thesis examines the everyday politics of women in two right-wing movements, the cultural nationalist Hindu right-wing project in India and the settler-colonial Zionist project in Israel-Palestine. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic, narrative, and visual ‘fieldwork’ conducted with women in both these movements, I argue that through a politics of the everyday, right-wing women  argain and negotiate with patriarchal communities/homes, male-formulated ideologies and discourses, and maledominated right-wing projects and spaces. These mediations replicate and affirm as well as subvert and challenge patriarchal structures and power hierarchies, troubling the binaries of home/world, private/public, personal/political, and victim/agent. I assert that dominant literature on rightwing women focuses on motherhood and family, ignoring various other crucial subject positions that are constituted and occupied by right-wing women and neglecting the agential and empowering potential of right-wing women’s subjectivities.

I use four themes/lenses to examine the everyday politics of right-wing women. These are: pedagogy and education; charity and humanitarian work; intimacy, friendship, sociability and leisure; and political  violence. By interrogating the practices that are contained in and enabled by these four locations of Hindu right-wing and Zionist settler women’s everyday politics, this thesis highlights the multiple narratives, contradictions, pluralities, hierarchies, power structures, languages, and discourses that encompass 4 right-wing women’s projects. By capturing the processes of subject formation of right-wing women, I encapsulate how my interlocutors shape the subjectivities of those in their communities, transforming the local and international landscapes of the Hindu right-wing and the Zionist settler project. Drawing together ethnographic narratives, ‘story-telling’, visuals,methodological and ethical reflections, and inter-disciplinary theoretical engagement, this thesis also asks what the many-layered textures of everyday politics of right-wing women might mean for feminist scholarship in gender studies, politics, and international relations, for feminist methodologies, for feminist ethics, and for feminist activism.