“Industrial Islamism” won the International Studies Association’s Best International Political Economy Award for 2025
The International Political Economy Best Book Award recognizes an outstanding monograph in the field of IPE published within the past two years. The IPE Best Book Award Committee has selected “Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers”, by Dr. Utku Balaban as the winner of the Section’s Best Book Award!
They said, “A truly original and memorable study, Industrial Islamism combines remarkable theoretical breadth and innovation with extraordinary empirical depth, including the author’s own fieldwork as a manual labourer in Istanbul’s garment factories. It is a captivating study of how shifts in the global political economy – namely the North Atlantic’s outsourcing of manufacturing to other world regions – have reshaped class structure and politics in Turkey and other Muslim-majority countries in unexpected ways. Balaban challenges the dominant explanation for the rise of Islamism, typically viewed as the reaction of oppressed subaltern masses to the secular political establishment. He skillfully argues and empirically demonstrates that an unlikely partnership with a newly formed class of non-monopoly industrial entrepreneurs serving global value chains – the “faubourgeoisie” – has enabled Turkey’s Islamist political movement to ascend and dominate politics. Industrial Islamism arguesthat the faubourgeoisie has supported Turkey’s Islamist movement to protect its precarious place in the global economy by becoming an influential actor in local and national politics. Populist Islamists have given the faubourgeoisie leverage over bigger capitalists in Turkey and internationally. In exchange, the faubourgeoisie used its influence to encourage millions of employees to abandon socialism and embrace Islamism. The book’s findings are suggestive of more general global patterns of political support for populist parties by small and medium enterprise owners caught up in global value chains controlled by large multinational firms.”
Utku Balaban is a sociologist specialized in urban, political, and economic sociology at Xavier University. Before he joined Xavier University’s Department of Race, Intersectionality, Gender, and Sociology in 2023, he taught at Ankara University, Tufts University, and Amherst College. Dr. Balaban currently serves as the director of the Sociology program at Xavier University.
In addition to his books on industrialization and social policy, his articles are published in journals such as Urban Studies, Social Research, Journal of World-Systems Research and Environment and Planning A. He is currently working on his third book project, Industrial Islamism, for University of California Press. In this book, he reexamines the relationship between the postwar industrialization and the growing significance of religious motifs in the politics of the Muslim-majority countries with a specific focus on Turkey in the post-Cold War era.