Daniel Neep

Senior Editor, Arab Center Washington DC

Daniel Neep is Senior Editor at Arab Center Washington DC. His research focuses on conflict and state-building in the Middle East, with a focus on Syria and the Levant. His career has spanned universities, thinktanks, and non-profit research centers in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. He was previously Assistant Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University; Assistant Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University; Lecturer in the Department of Politics, University of Exeter, England; and Research Director (Syria) at the Council for British Research in the Levant, in which capacity he was based in Damascus during the first year of the uprising before relocating to Jordan. He holds a PhD in Politics and a MA in Near & Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS, University of London, and a BA in Arabic with French from Oxford University. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the American Druze Foundation. His academic work has been published in journals including International Affairs, New Political Economy,  Journal of Historical Sociology, and International Journal of Middle East Studies. He is the author of Occupying Syria under the French Mandate: Insurgency, Space, and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Power, Resistance, Ideology and the State: Charles Tripp and the Comparative Politics of the Middle East (Gingko Press, 2025). His forthcoming book, Syria: A Modern History, analyzes the development of Syria’s politics, economics, and society from the 1800s to the fall of the Assad regime in 2024. It will be published by Basic Books in February 2026.