The Armed Drone Acquisition Debate in Germany: The Societalization of a Military Icon

Military acquisitions are typically handled within institutional boundaries, yet the 2012–2023 German public debate on the acquisition of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) illustrates how the drone-as-icon breached these boundaries and was invested with contested meaning. Embedded in Civil Sphere Theory (CST), the study uncovers a full icon-centred ‘societalization’ lifecycle and identifies mechanisms through which contestation unfolded, drawing on culturalist discourse analysis of media, peace movement, and institutional texts. Two mechanisms sustained an extended standoff: procedural entrapment , through which civil sphere actors turned the state’s own democratic commitments against it, and symbolic geography , through which state actors managed the icon’s pollution by keeping German territory visibly ‘clean’. Competing memory imperatives (‘Never Again War’ versus ‘Never Again Auschwitz’) provided narrative resources, initially neither achieving dominance. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine abruptly concluded the debate through crisis displacement . This trajectory reveals an internal structural limit: when aggression is performed as endangering the very conditions of civil life, civil sphere actors recode as civil the state violence this sphere normally constrains. The peace movement ( Friedensbewegung ) faced increased pollution as the civil meaning of ‘peace’ was destabilised, while armed drones could be recoded from anti-civil assassination devices into icons of civil defence. Iconicity can condition how societalization concludes when the same icon comes to anchor a different social problem.