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Amr Adly

  • Position: Associate Professor, Political Science
  • Department: Department of Political Science
  • Email: amradly82@aucegypt.edu
Brief Biography

Amr Adly is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at The American University in Cairo (AUC). He previously served as a researcher at the Middle East Directions Program at the European University Institute and as a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where his research focused on political economy, development studies and the economic sociology of the Middle East with a particular emphasis on Egypt.

Adly has taught political economy at AUC and Stanford University. He also worked as a project manager at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow.

He is the author of Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Failed Market-Making in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2020) and State Reform and Development in the Middle East: The Cases of Turkey and Egypt (Routledge, 2012). His work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including the Socio-Economic Review, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Contemporary Islam, Mediterranean Politics, Geoforum, Business and Politics, Turkish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies. Adly is also a frequent contributor to print and online news outlets, including Bloomberg, Jadaliyya and Al-Manassa.

Research Interest
  • Political economy
  • Economic sociology
  • Political economy of the Middle East
  • International political economy
  • Development studies
  • Comparative politics and Middle East studies
  • “The Marketization of Economic Informality: Rooftops, Housing and Private Property in a Cairo Neighborhood.” Socio-Economic Review (2025).
  • “Taxing the Rich but Not the Capitalists: Direct Taxation in Sisi’s Egypt (2014–2021).” Mediterranean Politics 30, no. 1 (2025): 108–131.
  • “An Islamist Economic Habitus: Islamist-Affiliated Businesses in Egypt.” Contemporary Islam 17, no. 3 (2023): 339–361. Egypt: Lumbering State; Restlessness Society (co-authored with Nathan Brown and Shaimaa Hattab), Columbia University Press, forthcoming in October 2021.
  • Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Failed Market-Making in Egypt, Stanford University Press, June 2020.
  • “Authoritarian Restitution in Bad Economic Times: Egypt and the Crisis of Global Neoliberalism.” Geoforum, 2020. Part of a special edition: Developmentalism in an Age of Authoritarian Neoliberalism edited by Murat Arsel and Alfredo Saad Filho.
  • “Beyond Regime Change: The State and the Crisis of Governance in Post-2011 Tunisia and Egypt” (with Hamza Meddeb) in Socioeconomic Protest in MENA and Latin America (eds. Jonas Wolff and Irene Weipert-Fenner), Palgrave, 2019. 
  • State Reform and Development in the Middle East: The Cases of Turkey and Egypt, London: Routledge Publications, 2012.
  • “Politically-Embedded Cronyism: The Case of Egypt.” Business and Politics 11, no. 4, December 2009.

Adly has a PhD in political economy from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2010). He graduated from the faculty of economics and political science at Cairo University in 2004, majoring in political science and minoring in economics.