Master of Arts in Islam and Global Affairs

Although the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) was not established with the explicit purpose of providing aid to the world’s underprivileged, its founders were motivated, at least in part, by a wish to impersonate and enhance “Islamic solidarity” in the face of widespread poverty in Muslimmajority countries (İhsanoğlu 2010:3). Diverse OIC institutions emerged, including the Islamic Development Bank (1975), the Islamic Solidarity Fund (1974), and the Islamic Centre for Development of Trade (1981), dealing with both humanitarian and developmental concerns (Kayaoglu 2015:17).

Embeddedness and local cultures and contexts are key in the development of entrepreneurship. Embeddedness is cultural, territorial and networked. All these aspects have to appropriately translate into entrepreneurship education, training and curricula. Entrepreneurs must be able to understand and translate values and culture, as well as the knowledge of their territories, into their work and practices. After a literature review, this chapter showcases these principles through the example of

This paper studies the local perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship in the resource-based state of Qatar. The effective utilization of abundant natural resources (oil and gas) have propelled the country’s rapid economic development over the last four decades. However, accelerating decarbonization efforts of the global energy system due to climate change put the future value of these hydrocarbon resources into doubt and hence the country’s revenue streams from international trade.

Geographies of the Islamic world manifest stark disparities in terms of social and economic development. While some of the countries of the Ummah (Islamic community) benefited from Western donors and their development aid, there have been efforts to build endogenous capacity. A relatively well-known example is the case of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), one of the major but not the only actor in Islamic development assistance. This study is an attempt to showcase Islamic development aid emanating from the Ummah, its geographical and organizational fractions and conditions.

This study seeks to advance the understanding of the utility of “soft power” by exploring the case of Qatar. The country's approach is conceptualized as “nested power” through the examination of its political strategies before and after the regional blockade in 2017. The role of soft and nested power in Qatar has already been examined through various vantage points, such as small state diplomacy, mediation, and sports.

This paper develops a theoretical model to analyze whether a rentier state can diversify its economy away from the rent revenue and hence sustain the economic development and preserve the status-quo. Considering the decarbonization process of the global economy and rapidly fall in economic value of hydrocarbons in the face of the supply glut, rentier states depending on oil and gas revenues urgently need to diversify their economies to avoid social backlash and political upheaval.

This chapter scrutinizes the fragmentation of the OIC aid system. It is argued that this fragmentation is a result of the asymmetrical intergovernmental relationship between a small number of aid donors (notably the hydrocarbon-rich Gulf States) and a large and increasing pool of aid recipients. The chapter illustrates that this process is empowered by the asymmetrical setting of the OIC (there are very few donors with whom to compete), donors have “bilateralized” the multilateral by supporting their own “aid recipients”. This has progressively fragmented the OIC aid system.