ACW Position
Director of Publications and Senior Fellow
Areas of Expertise
Conflict and state-building in the Middle East, Syria, the Levant
Daniel Neep
Director of Publications and Senior Fellow, Arab Center Washington DC
Daniel Neep is Senior Fellow and Director of Publications at Arab Center Washington DC. His work focuses on the long-run dynamics of state formation, conflict, and political economy in the Middle East, with a focus on Syria and the Levant, and on how these historical patterns shape contemporary policy challenges.
His career spans research and policy institutions in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. He was previously Assistant Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University; Assistant Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University; and Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter. He also served as Research Director (Syria) at the Council for British Research in the Levant, based in Damascus during the first year of the Syrian uprising before relocating to Jordan.
He holds a PhD in Politics and an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS, University of London, and a BA in Arabic and French from the University of Oxford. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the American Druze Foundation.
His most recent book, Syria: A Modern History (Basic Books, 2026), offers a long-run account of Syria’s political economy and state structures from the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Assad regime, and was reviewed in the Financial Times. He is a regular commentator on Middle East politics, with analysis in Foreign Policy. His academic work has appeared in journals including International Affairs, Journal of Democracy, and New Political Economy. He is also 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).
