Written by Felix Brender and Julian Vetterlein.
Image credit: TAP website.
The TAP research project is a collaborative project led by postdoctoral researchers. Its objectives extend beyond generating new research findings: one of the goals was to create a learning environment to support research interest in and about Taiwan. For this, TAP offered a travel grant programme aimed at both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Sinology and related disciplines. A total of eleven young scholars received support between 2022 and 2025. Also, each partner university hired student assistants and created possibilities to engage in their work and outreach. A key feature for managing the diverse research tasks within multifaceted interdisciplinary projects, such as TAP, is highly qualified and skilled students and research assistants. In this article, Felix Brender and Julian Vetterlein present their perspective on TAP’s contribution to creating an ecosystem for engagement.
Perspective from Felix Brender 王哲謙
I first became part of the TAP family as a stipend recipient, receiving a TAP travel bursary that enabled three months of fieldwork in Taiwan. For a project of TAP’s size, its institutional footprint is unusually consequential. As a German federally funded initiative, it was conceived not only to advance scholarship but to generate Taiwan-related knowledge with clear relevance for German foreign policy, an importance the previous German federal government recognised early on. In practical terms, this translated into the capacity to support sustained, on-the-ground research time and to embed that work within a wider ecosystem of exchange.
My project examined Taiwan’s most recent transitional justice programme under President Tsai Ing-wen (2016–2022), which can now be assessed with a measure of critical distance. I approached the programme not merely as a legal or moral reckoning with authoritarian abuses, but as a deliberate attempt to craft a shared and affirmative Taiwanese identity beyond the long-dominant, China-centred frame. The argument I developed is twofold. On the one hand, transitional justice under Tsai contributed to democratic consolidation and strengthened Taiwan’s international positioning as a liberal democratic polity. On the other hand, it generated new—and often unintended—forms of exclusion that complicate its contribution to peace, reconciliation, and social cohesion.
Three patterns were particularly salient in my material. First, transitional justice activities and outreach were disproportionately concentrated in Greater Taipei. While population density is an obvious partial explanation, the pattern also mirrors longer-standing regional inequalities in resources and institutional attention. Second, I traced the politics of language. The prominence of Taiwanese (Taiyu) as a symbolic marker of post-authoritarian identity may be politically intelligible. Yet it risks alienating Mandarin-speaking populations, many waishengren, younger Taiwanese, and communities with distinct linguistic traditions—Hakka and Indigenous groups in particular—if multilingual engagement remains limited. Third, I examined a structural paradox of identity-building: the construction of an inclusive “we” often depends on defining a “they”. In this case, transitional justice narratives have tended to marginalise identifications rooted in the Republic of China framework and, to a lesser extent, post-colonial Japanese affiliations. None of this negates the programme’s value; rather, it foregrounds the tensions that accompany any attempt to renegotiate national narratives through state-led memory work.
Taiwan illustrates a wider tension in state-led memory politics: initiatives that consolidate a democratic “we” can simultaneously produce new boundaries, making the management of centre–periphery gaps, linguistic diversity, and competing historical identifications central to successful programme design.
One of the immediate benefits of the TAP bursary was that it accelerated the move from fieldwork to scholarly exchange. I presented my findings at the Taiwan as a Contact Zone conference in Vienna in January 2025, a rigorous but collegial setting in which to test an argument still close to the empirical material and to situate Taiwan’s case comparatively without flattening its specificity. Later that year, I presented the work again at the TAP workshop in September 2025. While similarly supportive in tone, the workshop’s longer format enabled more sustained engagement—time for granular discussion of evidence, methodological choices, and interpretive stakes that conference panels rarely allow. That depth of conversation proved decisive in refining the internal architecture of the argument and clarifying what, precisely, the case contributes to broader debates in Taiwan Studies and peace and conflict scholarship.
The project then moved from presentation to publication, appearing in the 2025 proceedings/retrospect volume published in January 2026. That trajectory from funded fieldwork, to conference exchange, to intensive workshop discussion, to a published contribution captures TAP’s distinctive value as an ecosystem rather than a single funding line. It supported the full research cycle, including the less visible but intellectually determinative phases of iteration, critique, and consolidation. Importantly, the fieldwork material itself remains productive: I anticipate developing at least one or two further articles from the same empirical base.
My role within TAP later expanded when I joined the team as an editor and support for the TAP team, supporting work towards the forthcoming volume Taiwan Studies Revisited: Islands of Inquiry. This work has given me a macro, bird’s-eye view of the breadth and scope of Taiwan Studies, and of how TAP’s curatorial logic makes that breadth analytically productive rather than merely eclectic. Engaging with contributions ranging from music and poetry to international relations, religious practice, and Indigenous and Aboriginal topics has reinforced a core insight: Taiwan Studies is not defined by a single methodology or canon, but by its capacity to bring diverse approaches into conversation around a shared empirical and political terrain.
Equally significant, TAP consistently convenes beyond the academy. The presence of policymakers, diplomats, and practitioners alongside researchers is not an ornamental add-on; it is a reminder that Taiwan-focused knowledge circulates in, and can shape, policy worlds. For me, that interface has sharpened my sense of how scholarship can travel: how concepts, empirical findings, and historical nuance can inform public reasoning without being reduced to mere “policy relevance”. Taken together, my experience within TAP, first as a stipend recipient and later as a member of the team, has provided both the material conditions for sustained research and an intellectually demanding community in which that research can be tested, refined, and made legible across disciplinary and professional boundaries.
Perspective from Julian Vetterlein 費連恩
As a student at Trier University, I knew about TAP and visited events organised by and with the project; students in Trier benefit greatly from these. Lectures and events in Trier might not be the most visible work of TAP, but it represents an important part of universities for students. A lecture held by TAP represents the base of an ecosystem which reaches out to anyone interested in the project or the greater field of Taiwan research.
During September 2024, I was participating in a language course in Tainan and applied as a research assistant for TAP when I saw the opening. I had my interview later that month, still in my hotel room in Tainan. After returning to Germany in October, it took less than a month before the 2024 Mapping Taiwan Teaching Workshop started in Trier, and I was able to see the relevance of connecting research and the benefits of doing so. Gaining insights and discussing how Taiwan is talked about and studied was not only interesting but can highlight potential gaps or points of interest in research. This holds true for all the work TAP has done by supporting an influx of new ideas, perspectives and people to further knowledge and interest about Taiwan.
Since then, I have been working for TAP while continuing my studies in Trier and supplemented my courses with unique and helpful insights from the project that have not only furthered my own knowledge but motivated me to continue to concentrate on Taiwan-focused research. Due to the nature of the project, my work was able to continue mostly unchanged when I went abroad to continue my studies at National Chengchi University in September 2025. Even though I did not come to Taiwan specifically because of my work at TAP, I still very clearly saw the extensive international political and research networks spanning from and to Taiwan. Trier University is a partner of the National Chengchi University (NCCU). Enrollment for students of Trier University is convenient, free of charge, and there is also a strong academic connection between the two partners. In 2025, a German-Taiwanese Student Exchange Society was founded and holds events to connect German exchange students to Taiwanese students and helps in organising lectures. Professor Kristin Shi-Kupfer from Trier University visited the NCCU for a few months and held lectures and participated in events. Trier University, NCCU and TAP all support an academic exchange between Germany and Taiwan and thereby greatly strengthen mutual understanding and knowledge about Taiwan and Germany.
On the National Day of Taiwan, 10.10.2025, I attended the 1st Taipei Germany Conference in Taipei along with TAP project-lead Dr Josie-Marie Perkuhn. The conference focused on the importance of Taiwan during times of global uncertainty and the invaluable connection between other democratic states and Taiwan and its people. The conference and other institutions, such as the German-Taiwanese Dialogue Platform, show the strong and still growing connections between Taiwan and other countries.
My work as a research assistant within TAP has not only been a great connection to my university studies in politics and sinology but has furthered and shaped my knowledge and understanding of Taiwan in ways that go far beyond the scope of a degree. Most importantly, TAP represents the recognition of the relevance of Taiwan-related knowledge. Not only does it support research, but it further establishes Taiwan as a focus of academia. TAP is not a closed-off ecosystem but rather part of the greater Field of Taiwan research and has helped many people, like myself, in the development of skills and knowledge to establish Taiwan research and knowledge permanently.
Felix Brender 王哲謙 was an editor and research assistant with the TAP team at Trier University. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where his work focused on Chinese approaches to security and conflict management. His research sits at the intersection of international relations, peace and conflict studies, and the politics of memory and identity, with particular interests in Taiwan’s international relations and transitional justice and post-conflict reconciliation efforts. In parallel to his academic work, he has extensive professional experience as a conference interpreter, supporting diplomatic and corporate engagements across Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and the Gulf.
Julian Vetterlein 費連恩 is a research assistant in the TAP team at Trier University. He studies Political Science and Modern China Studies in Trier and at National Chengchi University. His interests include cross-strait relations, digital democracy, and media and news reporting.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Taiwan as a Pioneer (TAP): Visions and Practices’.
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