Insight Turkey
Insight Turkey
Challenging ideas
On Turkish politics and International affairs

Author

Taner Akan

King’s College, UK
Taner Akan
Is an “Islamic Political Economy” in the Making across the Middle East and North Africa?: A Path-Dependent Institutional Change Analysis
July 1, 2015
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.

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