Editors’ Note: Contemporary Islamic Political and Social Thought Before and After the Arab Spring: Mapping the Field

Research output

Complete citation

Kostić, Ivan Ejub, and Emin Poljarević. “Editors’ Note: Contemporary Islamic Political and Social Thought Before and After the Arab Spring: Mapping the Field.” Philosophy and Society 35, no. 3 (2024): 461–463.

Status

Published (2024)

Publication type

Editors’ note to a thematic issue

Overview

This editors’ note introduces a thematic issue devoted to contemporary Islamic political and social thought before and after the Arab Spring. Written amid the war in Gaza and the West Bank, it places the issue’s intellectual concerns within an urgent political context while avoiding the assumption that Islamic thought can be reduced to the programmes of Islamist organisations. The note maps a field marked by ideological plurality, changing state–society relations, contested ideas of secularism and the civil state, and the uneven translation of ethical and political visions into durable institutions. It presents the collected articles as a critical examination of post-uprising transformations across several national and intellectual settings. Its contribution is an economical conceptual orientation to a field in which normative commitments, political strategies, and socio-economic pressures interact without producing a single post-Arab-Spring trajectory.

Research question or central concern

How should scholars map the transformations of Islamic political and social thought across the Arab Spring and its aftermath without reducing the field to a single ideological or organisational trajectory?

Main argument, approach, and contribution

The note treats the field as plural, contested, and responsive to shifting political conditions. It argues that the gap between ideological coherence and effective responses to socio-economic realities is central to understanding contemporary Islamic movements. The thematic issue therefore combines political theory, intellectual history, and contextual analysis.

Keywords

Islamic political thought; Arab Spring; Islamism; post-Islamism; civil state; secularism; Gaza; political strategy