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How can nationalist security narratives, and the political elites articulating them, become politically dominant? And what happens when they do? That is, how does this type of narrative contention and transformation at the domestic level shape international relations and order? Over the past year, the steady rise of populist-nationalist movements has pushed these questions to the forefront of discussion surrounding the future trajectory of global politics and the liberal, rule-based international order. Across the European continent, centrist governments struggle to win robust majorities running on traditional platforms that promote cosmopolitan values and regional integration. Meanwhile, right-wing populist parties have surged in local and national elections in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Austria using a potent mixture of identity politics and chauvinistic mythmaking to mobilize support for an alternative political program. Why is this happening now? I argue that despite a growing concern for the causal role of narratives, rhetoric, and identity politics in shaping national security debate and policy (e.g. Buzan et al. 1998; Jackson 2006; Krebs 2015; Miskimmon et al. 2017), students of international relations remain hard-pressed to answer questions related to the phenomenon of narrative contestation and change. Two factors explain this limitation: First, extant accounts often exclude the individual subject from the center of analysis focusing instead on the role of narrative in the constitution of collective agents, such as the nation-state, or ethnic groups (Kaufman 2009/2015). The emphasis on macro-level processes of meaning-making, however, means that the specific cognitive-psychological mechanisms of storytelling—how stories drive people at the individual level—remain underexplored. Second, current work on narratives tends to emphasize dominant and established narratives in the context of several high-profile cases, such as U.S. security policy after World War II (e.g. Hayes 2013; Krebs 2015). While this work has enriched our understanding of how rhetorical processes affect foreign policy in some cases, it comes at the expense of studying the genesis of alternative narratives, contention within and among narratives, and the timely phenomenon of narrative change in a variety of different contexts. To address this, the present project develops the concept of security narration (SN); the dialogical tool by which elites narrate security politics to domestic audiences with the goal of building sustainable ruling coalitions. I anchor this conceptual move by first building on experimental findings in narrative psychology, stipulating that the power of SN is manifest in its function of (1) bridging individual and collective-level perceptions of social reality through the processes of social representation (Moscovici 1984) and (2) enabling individuals to maintain a unified sense of self during periods of extreme anomie and cultural anxiety; what some call narrative practice or therapy (Monk et al. 1997). Lastly, I bring this refurbished understanding of narrative politics into conversation with relational social theory. The central contribution of this approach is to view collective action as the product of recurrent sociocultural interaction between social aggregates of various sorts (Tilly 1996, 2; Nexon and Jackson 1999). The relational approach rejects traditional notions of the unitary interest-driven state and argues that social actors derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the functional roles they play within social transactions; making relationalism a suitable framework for analyzing SN. Moreover, relational theory provides us with a rich tool box of causal processes and mechanisms to understand claims-making, contention, and narrative change similar to other types of contentious politics (McAdam et al. 2001; Tilly 2003). Drawing these together, I develop a process-model for the comparative analysis of nationalist security narratives focusing on four general processes: (1) sociopolitical contention generates popular demand for new narratives promising to reimpose cognitive and cultural order; (2) polarization (i.e. existing ideological cleavages in the political elite) facilitates both the supply of new narratives and the mobilizing structures necessary to project them publicly; (3) the brokerage capacity of political elites determines the domestic success of these narratives; and (4) international pressures shape the diplomatic reception of new policy outcomes—once projected externally. To test these hypotheses, I compare processes of SN in two unlikely cases: 1830s British protonationalism or “Palmerstonianism” and the rise of the nationalist AfD party in contemporary Germany. The analysis suggests that while both movements were driven by widespread public contention, differences in elite cohesion and party polarization produced different electoral and policy outcomes.