My research uncovers how U.S. security policies towards India have changed during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr. and Barack Obama. The U.S. and India have engaged in closer relations during the last three US. administrations than in the Cold War period. The core question of my research is: What discursive changes made it possible for U.S. security policies towards India to change since the Clinton administration in 1993? I argue that these changes in security policies are made possible by changing policy discourses during the last three presidencies after the Cold War. The rationale for starting with the Clinton administration is that US.-India relations were often distant until the Clinton administration, after which relations improved. My research will thus make use of a critical constructivist approach in which phenomena are seen as socially constructed. In policy discourses, security policies are not merely solutions to security issues: policy discourses help to construct how a security issue should be understood and how it should be solved. The main aim of this research is to gain a better understanding of how changes in U.S. security policies towards India were made possible during each presidency, analyzing how meanings are produced and attached to objects such as the U.S., i.e. the Self, and India, i.e.' the Other, within policy discourses.

Post-Cold War US nuclear policies towards India witnessed a major swing as they developed from being a demand for the ‘halt, cap, rollback’ during Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001) to the signing and implementation of the historic ‘civil nuclear deal’ during the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009). This thesis addresses this change in US nuclear foreign policy by focusing on three core categories of identity, inequality and great power narratives. First, building upon the theoretical paradigm of critical constructivism, the thesis problematises the concept of the ‘state’ by focusing on identity-related questions arguing that the ‘state’ becomes a constructed entity standing as valid only within relations of identity and difference. Secondly, focusing on postcolonial principles, it argues that imperialism as an organising principle of identity/difference enables us to understand how difference was maintained in unequal terms through US nuclear foreign policy and that foreign policy is manifested in five great power narratives constructed around: peace and justice; India-Pakistan deterrence; democracy; economic progress; and scientific development. Thirdly, identities of ‘race’, ‘political economy’ and ‘gender’, in terms of radical otherness and otherness were recurrently utilised through these narratives to maintain a difference, which enabled the Bill Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations to maintain ‘US’ identity as a progressive and developed western nation, intrinsically justifying the US role as an arbiter of the global nuclear order. The contribution of the thesis: an interdisciplinary perspective on US state identity as connected to the global nuclear order and implications of nuclear policy towards India; a comparative perspective on great power narratives of the Clinton and the Bush administrations that are historically contingent; and methodological insights into temporal and spatial dimensions of textuality through the discourse analysis of primary material.

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