Policy-Mediated Epistemic Control: How Authoritarian Regimes Repurpose Graduate Political Science Research Agenda - The Case of Islamic Republic of Iran

This study explores how higher education policy in authoritarian contexts reshapes graduate-level political science research agenda through ideologically driven curricular and institutional mechanisms. Focusing on master's and doctoral theses from Iran’s Islamic Republic academia (1999–2024), the analysis employs natural language processing and statistical clustering to reveal a systematic realignment of research priorities away from critical governance studies toward regime-legitimizing narratives in foreign policy, historical revisionism, and Islamic political thought. The findings demonstrate that this transformation is not an organic scholarly trend, but a deliberate outcome of state-led epistemic engineering mediated by centralized curriculum design, funding incentives, faculty vetting, and ideological surveillance. By reframing graduate education as a site of ideological reproduction rather than critical inquiry, the Iranian case illustrates broader patterns of authoritarian knowledge production where academic autonomy is subordinated to regime preservation. These insights contribute to global debates on higher education policy, particularly regarding the politicization of curricula, depoliticization of disciplinary norms, and the structural constraints on academic freedom under authoritarian rule. The methodological approach offers a replicable model for studying policy-induced shifts in research trajectories across non-democratic contexts.

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