Liminal Security: Civil Society Resilience under Contested Sovereignty in Taiwan

How do civil society resilience practices in Taiwan reshape conventional understandings of security and protection under contested sovereignty? Existing International Relations (IR) frameworks often treat Taiwan's contested sovereignty as vulnerability, signaling incomplete recognition and dependence on military aid. This thesis argues that Taiwan's liminal position in the international system creates political space for alternative forms of security and protection to emerge. Drawing on liminality, feminist and queer IR, and critical resilience scholarship, I conceptualize liminal security as a form of security produced through distributed agency, non-binary roles, and socially embedded preparedness. I use discourse analysis to examine how Taiwanese civil defense NGOs, Kuma Academy and Forward Alliance, frame security, protection, and resilience in public-facing texts. The thesis finds that civil defense NGOs reconfigure security in four ways. First, they expand the category of security actors beyond the military by inviting ordinary civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, to participate in preparedness efforts. Second, they destabilize masculinist protection by framing women and other non-militarized subjects as active providers of resilience. Third, they transform protection from a hierarchical state-citizen relationship into a relational practice of self-help and mutual aid. Fourth, they embed preparedness into everyday life rather than reserving security for exceptional moments of war or crisis. Together, these findings show that Taiwan's resilience is produced not only through military deterrence or state capacity, but through civil society practices that redistribute protection across society.