From Hashtag to Policy Agenda: Exploring the Role of German Twitter in the 2022 Iranian Revolutionary Movement

Abstract

This master's thesis examines how the Iranian Revolutionary Movement 2022 utilised German Twitter to influence Germany's foreign policy agenda toward Iran. Discursive strategies in the context of social movement studies, besides frame theory, remain understudied. This is particularly true for movements resisting or challenging mainstream, hegemonic discourses. By exploring how the movement utilises German Twitter for the formulation of counter- narratives and strategies of resistance we can gain insight into the hegemonic discourse in German public and political discourses and how the movement addresses them. By using Lazar's (2005) Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) as the theoretical and methodological backbone it was able to identify two counter-narratives and two strategies of resistance and analysed the political impact of them.