Beyond Islamic finance: Reframing Islamic Political Economy through power, institutions, and distributive justice
Year: 2026
Type: article
Study design: Systematic Review
Abstract: Islamic Political Economy has expanded rapidly over the past decade, yet its intellectual development remains fragmented and strongly concentrated on Islamic finance. This study maps the evolution, intellectual structure, and conceptual organization of the field, identifies its principal theoretical limitations, and develops an integrative framework for future research. It employs a bibliometric systematic review of 102 Scopus-indexed publications published between 2015 and July 2026. Bibliometric techniques including publication trend analysis, co-authorship analysis, co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence, thematic mapping, trend-topic analysis, and three-field analysis are combined with a systematic literature review to produce a theory driven synthesis. The findings reveal rapid but asymmetric institutionalization. Although the field has expanded beyond banking to include sustainability, zakat, waqf, and Islamic social finance, its intellectual and conceptual structures remain dominated by a finance-centred paradigm. Three major theoretical gaps are identified: the marginalization of power in explanations of economic governance, the inadequate treatment of institutions as mechanisms linking Islamic normative principles to socioeconomic outcomes, and the under-specification of distributive justice as the principal evaluative criterion. To address these limitations, the study proposes an Integrative Islamic Political Economy Framework in which power shapes institutions, institutions organize economic processes, and these processes produce distributive outcomes that must be evaluated against distributive justice, maqāṣid al-sharīʿah, falah, and sustainable development. This recursive process, conceptualized as Maqasid Based Institutional Transformation, also recognizes that distributive outcomes can reshape power relations and institutional arrangements. Moving beyond the prevailing finance-centred perspective, the study reconceptualizes Islamic Political Economy as an integrated political-economic system grounded in power, institutions, economic processes, and distributive justice. The framework provides a theoretical foundation for interdisciplinary research on the institutional conditions under which Islamic economic principles can contribute to equitable and sustainable human development.
Source: Multidisciplinary Reviews
Institution: Institut Ahmad Dahlan Probolinggo
Language: English
Subfield: Accounting
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7220194635