Policy Discourses and Security Issues: US Foreign Policy Toward India During the Clinton Administration

This article explores how changing US security policies toward India were enabled by policy discourses. Since the second Clinton administration, the United States has shown a continuous interest in India. In order to analyze this, the article makes use of a critical constructivist approach in which phenomena are seen as socially constructed. It reveals how meanings are produced and attached to objects such as the United States and India within policy discourses. In policy discourses, security policies are not merely solutions to security issues: Policy discourses help to construct how security problems, objects, and subjects should be understood, and they simultaneously articulate security policies to solve the issues. These policy discourses enable and constrain foreign policy options available to foreign policy-makers. This article demonstrates that in 1997, India’s subject-position transformed, which made possible future policy changes in US foreign policy toward India.