I am happy to announce that my article on the German Bundeswehr’s activities on social media (“Soziale Medien und die Legitimitätspolitik der Bundeswehr”) has been published in the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen.
The article discusses the social media activities of the Bundeswehr, the German Armed Forces, which so far have received only limited attention in the academic literature. The Bundeswehr has an active presence on social media sites, such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, and it uses it both to inform the public and for recruitment purposes. The article argues that scholars should pay more attention to social media as a significant site where struggles over how to interpret reality play out. To that end, it provides a brief summary of research on social media in Critical Military Studies. Following that, the article provides an overview of the Bundeswehr’s activities on social media and illustrates how the specific way the Bundeswehr presents itself on social media might contribute not just to its legitimacy as a governmental institution but also to the legitimacy of its activities, including military violence.
Keywords: social media, Bundeswehr, military, armed forces, militarization
doi: 10.5771/0946-7165-2021-2-152 
A pre-print is available here.