The Middle East’s modernization drives initiated in the 1800s transferred power in stages from clerics to secular officials. Turkey’s secularization under Atatürk and İnönü is the boldest effort in this vein. Other ambitious campaigns occurred in Iran under the Pahlavis, Egypt under Nasser, and Tunisia under Bourguiba. These regimes might have been expected to facilitate exits from Islam, radically reinterpret the Quran, and broaden religious freedoms generally. In fact, they simply made it easy to ignore Islam. Their ideal was to have citizens disconnect their public selves from religion, and they felt justified in imposing their preferences on the masses. Indeed, they treated certain Islamic practices as archaic and drove them out of the public realm. Just as heterodox Muslims were once repressed as heretics or apostates, so now under secular leaders the pious were persecuted as obscurantists. In the process, modernizers constricted all discourses on Islam. Quashing dissent on religious policies, they effectively replaced one form of religious repression with another. Some secularists considered their illiberal policies transitional. Religiosity would decline with economic development, they believed, and worldviews would become secularized. But resistance from the pious led, instead, to a softening of secularist repression.

The people, communities, and companies we feature in this book face uncertain futures. The concluding chapter pulls together the themes of the book and our lessons for scholars, policymakers, companies, and nonprofits. We then dive into enduring challenges that climate and energy transitions will face. For example, we discuss connections between credibility and the clash between free trade and national industrial policies, the uncertain technological future, and the barriers developing countries face in their energy transitions. We also set an agenda for future research areas, including the importance of equity concerns and adaptation to the effects of climate change. Finally, we discuss the outlook for legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act that seeks to overhaul the US energy system in dramatic ways but in a highly partisan environment.

The clean energy transition needs a workforce. Yet despite the societal demand for green energy, this workforce does not yet exist at the scale required. We show how in addition to economic explanations for why participation in workforce programs struggles, political uncertainty also creates barriers. This becomes apparent when one considers how job and potential job seekers think about local economic opportunity. This chapter unpacks the concerns and motivations of job-seekers. We feature surveys of youths, including a survey of middle schoolers conducted by a school district in coal country. We show that making workforce programs more credible can create interest in these programs and broader support for energy transitions.

This chapter is about how China’s innovation policies have evolved to reflect a changing and supposedly better understanding of the innovation by China’s policymakers. It carries out a quantitative analysis of 630 innovation policies issued by China’s central government ministries from 1980 to 2019. It concludes that China has shifted its S&T and industrial policy-centered innovation strategy and pursued a more coordinated innovation-oriented economic development by giving increasing attention to a portfolio of policies that also include financial, tax, and fiscal measures. There has been a gradual departure from the pattern in which innovation policies are formulated by one single government agency, therefore steering China to a different and probably more promising innovation trajectory.

Although entry into Islam is costless, exit was banned early on. According to a widely accepted interpretation of early Islam, soon after Muhammad’s death a precedent for banning apostasy was set. In fact, the underlying dispute was over zakat, and the episode amounted to enforcing the tax code. But recasting this historical detail would not necessarily settle controversies over Muslim religious freedoms. Certain Quran verses speak of retribution against nonbelievers. Others preclude compulsion, arguably establishing a right to leave Islam. Insofar as a textual inconsistency exists – and that itself is debatable – for advocates of liberalizing Islam the challenge boils down to prioritizing liberal verses. Blasphemy and heresy charges, used repeatedly to persecute heterodox sects, also restrict sundry liberties. The fear of getting accused of religious offense constrains political discourse and inhibits collective action. But a broadening of Muslim religious freedoms through the liberalization of apostasy and blasphemy rules is not unthinkable. Analogous transformations have occurred in other religions. Besides, Islam has been reinterpreted repeatedly since its emergence, radically so in modern times. Innovations include Islamic banks, which are business corporations, and various Islamic NGOs, which are organized as nonprofit corporations. Evidently, no absolute barrier exists to broadening Islamic religious freedoms.

Paths to a liberal order are not limited to those followed by Western countries. A possible Middle Eastern starting point was zakat, Islam’s only “pillar” with an explicitly economic function. Zakat appears in the Quran as a system that finances designated state expenses through a tax on wealth and income. The rates were low by the standards of Antiquity, and they were fixed. Besides, the payment of zakat legitimated the underlying wealth or income. Hence, it could have served as the foundation for political checks and balances based on secure private ownership. Yet zakat’s specifics were suited specifically to Arabia; it left out major sources of income and wealth in the broader Middle East. For these reasons alone, rulers imposed extra-Islamic taxes. Having set precedents for arbitrary taxation, they then essentially stopped enforcing zakat. A Quran-based Islamic institution for empowering the individual against the state thus turned into a minor device for local poor relief. The waqf’s emergence in the 700s as a core Islamic institution was a creative response to zakat’s abandonment as a state-enforced transfer system. Its unintended effects, such as the persistent weakness of civil society, are rooted, then, in zakat’s loss of relevance to Islamic governance.

Our final chapter concludes the book by summarizing the findings from our studies of the political economy of S&T and innovation in China, discussing tensions faced by China through the perspective of the political economy in the studies of S&T and innovation in China, and drawing some governance implications for the political economic study of China’s S&T and innovation in general.

In considering the interconnected realms of the digital and material commons/commoning in prior chapters, one clear underlying theme has been the continuous tension between compeerist-aligned forms of economic activity and a still dominant capitalist mode of production. Recall that a mode of production consists of the self-reinforcing economic and social arrangements that determine how the production and consumption of goods and services takes place. These assemblages/apparatuses, in turn, are agglomerations of animate and inanimate forces, meaning that we are not only dealing with the materialities of physical and social (re)production, but also with the realm of affect, state of mind, and mental frameworks.

Some mental frameworks are so ingrained and pervasive that they are barely acknowledged. We can call these hegemonic, as their taken-for-granted validity have become foundational in the scaffolding of our entire worldview, keeping us locked into a particular mode of thinking and operation. There is an apt story that captures this inability to see past our taken for granted way of perceiving the world. It goes something like this: two fish swimming in the river encounter an older fish swimming towards them. The older fish asks, “How's the water?” The two fish swim on until one finally turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

One immensely important hegemonic frame through which we see the world is our currently dominant conceptualization of value, which is well captured in the words of the ancient Latin thinker Publilius Syrus who is credited with saying, ‘everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it’. It is a view that has become so firmly entrenched under capitalism that it is embraced as dogma by economists and as ‘common sense’ by everyone else. It has become the water that we swim in. Here the obfuscated working of the market – the invisible hand – is unconsciously accepted as a kind of omnipotent God, or supercomputer, ‘cranking out the current value of everything in the form of price’ (Gerhardt, 2020). It is a world described by the concept of commodity fetishism, in which we cannot help but see the world through an exchange-value lens. Any thought of intrinsic or derived value in natural or humanly crafted things never comes to mind.

Yet, this sterile market approach to value is actually quite recent.