Taner Akan

The Arab Uprisings and their transformational impact across MENA have generated immense debate about the future of the region’s countries during a period of reorganizational crisis in the international political economy. At this stage of the unfolding region-wide transition in the MENA, this paper performs a two-step theoreticopractical examination of the processes between and after the Uprisings. Firstly it crystallizes the ambiguous manifestations between the theory of Islamic political economy and the praxis of these Muslim-majority countries: the high-income Arab Gulf States, upper-middle-income Tunisia, and lower-middle-income Egypt. Secondly it contextualizes the evolving continuities and discontinuities in these countries between economy, polity, and society using the eight patterns of path-dependent changes that the author develops. A discussion will ensue on the prospective changes these nations will face in terms of the potential trajectories of systemic change between the embedded path-dependencies of the established regimes and the patterns of change demanded by the subversive Islamic factions.