Eurocentrism and epistemic governance in the genealogy of international relations in Taiwan

Why does Taiwan remain marginal to International Relations (IR) theory despite its geopolitical salience? This article answers that question through a genealogical analysis of IR’s formation in Taiwan. It argues that IR in Taiwan emerged not as an autonomous discipline, but as an apparatus of epistemic governance shaped by colonial rule, Cold War authoritarianism, and post-authoritarian academic restructuring. Across these three conjunctures, the field sought legitimacy through externally authorised standards, from imperial models of legal–political knowledge to US-centred security frameworks and Anglo-American publication metrics. Taiwan’s IR, however, was not simply derivative. Its development also involved strategic appropriation, translation, and adaptation under unequal epistemic conditions. The article, therefore, reframes Taiwan not merely as an empirical case for existing theory but as a site from which the global hierarchies of disciplinary knowledge can be interrogated. In doing so, it contributes to debates on decolonising IR by showing how epistemic marginality is historically produced and institutionally reproduced, even where intellectual agency persists.