Even though Islam was an important motif in the politics of Muslim-majority countries throughout the 20th century, Islamist movements have challenged the political establishments in Muslim-majority countries only since the 1980s. Iran had its Islamic revolution in the late 1970s, while many other Muslim-majority countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia have had their “Islamic revivalism” from the 1980s onward. This simple fact draws our attention to the relationship between the global political economic transformation in the wake of the collapse of the postwar developmentalist regimes and the rise of Islamist movements all around the Muslim world. In this presentation, I first discuss how to make sense of this coincidence: the dominant approach about Islamic revivalism puts the emphasis on the resistance of the subaltern communities against the developmentalist regimes and presents the Islamist movements as a reactionary force that are argued to raise the voice of those communities in the name of an antimodernist/anticapitalist narrative. Second, I argue that Islamist movements, in fact, hijack the resentment of those communities in order to establish and govern new patterns of connection to the global economy. Last, I discuss the Turkish case, which has been for long seen as the citadel of secularism in the Muslim-majority world. As of now, Turkey has the second longest uninterrupted Islamist government after Iran. In the very same period since the early 2000s, Islamists have taken progressive steps to incorporate Turkey to the post-Cold War global political economic system and facilitated an environmentally hazardous low-wage industrial development. In effect, Turkey is not exceptional but a case that vividly illustrates how the Islamist movements have played an instrumental role in the subjugation of the subaltern communities in various exploitative labor relations within their domestic contexts for the last four decades.

Growth Model Perspective (GMP) provides a valuable way of comparing capitalisms. Recent research also elaborates on the trajectories of major emerging markets to avoid both bipolarity and Eurocentrism in comparative capitalisms literature. However, GMP needs to explain the power blocs built around growth models and the dynamism of the strategies with regards to the global political and economic developments. This paper will analyze the growth models in Turkey and Egypt in the 21st century. It will also critically evaluate the politicism of authoritarianism analyses in the global South. Finally, it will explain the persistence of authoritarian statecraft by triangulating growth models in the last two decades with the power structures and growth supporting policy interventions.

In the last decade, many observers have suggested that neoliberalism falls short of representing some significant changes in state-market relations in countries of the global South. A post-neoliberal turn, they argue, is evidenced by the increasing state involvement in economic management through industrial subsidies, mega infrastructural projects, state banks, protectionist tariff policies, and the like. In Turkey as well, the contention that neoliberalism has become a misnomer to describe the country’s development strategy has gained ground due to the intensified discretionary state interventions in the economy. In this paper, I argue that although there has been a shift in the 2010s, from a rule-based/technocratic economic policy-making to a more discretionary and coercive mode of governance (characterized by new forms of state interventionism), we have some important reasons to be cautious about declaring neoliberalism dead in Turkey. The paper discusses these reasons focusing on changes and continuities in the investment promotion regime, wage policies and labour regulations in Turkey during the Justice and Development Party governments. Its main contention is that the Turkish case provides solid evidence for the need to reconsider the positive correlation often made between the rule of law, limited state interventionism, democratic governance and neoliberalism.