Looking at the Eastern Mediterranean Through the Lens of Epistemic Community

This article examines how scholarly knowledge production shapes prevailing policy narratives regarding the Eastern Mediterranean. Relying on Haas’s epistemic community concept, the article investigates how epistemic community on the Eastern Mediterranean influence particular conceptions of collaboration, conflict, and regional order. Rather than accepting academic studies as merely explicators of the regional status quo, the article emphasizes how these studies contribute to the creation and reproduction of Eurocentric, state-centric, and security-oriented perspectives. To provide a more in-depth engagement regarding the production, legitimization, and dissemination of knowledge within the academic community, the article examines academic studies on the Eastern Mediterranean indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection between 1995 and 2025 through a combination of bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review methodologies. By employing a two-pronged methodology, including descriptive statistics, network analysis, textual analysis, and coding of authors’ genders, and theoretical and methodological frameworks, this article presents a multifaceted perspective regarding the Eastern Mediterranean, illuminating both biases and knowledge gaps. Findings reveal a prevalence of discursive bias towards conflict rather than cooperation, dominance of Eurocentric approaches at the expense of non-Western or local perspectives, and gender disparities in authorship.