We are happy to announce a new article “The Armed Drone Acquisition Debate in Germany: The Societalization of a Military Icon” by Marian Pradella and published in Cultural Sociology.
“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.”
Marian Pradella
Cultural Sociology is the official journal of the British Sociological Association and serves as a leading international forum for the sociological study of culture. As a fully peer-reviewed journal, it publishes original research and review articles that examine cultural phenomena through diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. Positioned as a central meeting point within the field, the journal brings together scholars from different national contexts and analytical traditions, fostering dialogue across perspectives within cultural sociology and the broader sociology of culture.
The journal focuses on advancing sociological understandings of culture by publishing empirically grounded, theoretically informed, and methodologically rigorous work. Its scope spans a wide range of topics, including cultural production and consumption, media and performance, identity and inequality (such as class, gender, and ethnicity), as well as globalization, everyday culture, and emerging cultural trends. By encouraging both established and early-career researchers to contribute, and by promoting interdisciplinary exchange with fields such as cultural studies or human geography, Cultural Sociology aims not only to consolidate the field but also to shape its future directions and intellectual boundaries.
Pradella, M. 2026. The Armed Drone Acquisition Debate in Germany: The Societalization of a Military Icon. Cultural Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755261486573
