Daniel Neep — Syria: A Modern History
Historian Daniel Neep presents a landmark account of Syria's transformation through decades of conflict, in conversation with Ariel I. Ahram at Politics and Prose.
Why we picked this
With Syria's trajectory still unfolding, Neep's historical depth offers the kind of context that breaking news never can — this is the long view that DC's policy community needs.
Daniel Neep is a historian of the modern Middle East whose scholarly work on Syria spans the French Mandate period through the present, giving him an unusually long view of how the country arrived at its current moment. “Syria: A Modern History” draws on decades of research to trace the accumulation of political choices, external interventions, and structural conditions that shaped the Syrian state — and the limits of what any single explanation can account for.
The timing makes this event particularly relevant. Syria’s post-Assad transition remains uncertain, and the discourse around it is shaped heavily by immediate coverage that lacks the historical grounding to distinguish what is new from what is a recurrence of older patterns. Neep’s work provides exactly that grounding: a narrative long enough to show cause and effect that operate over generations, not news cycles.
In conversation with Ariel I. Ahram, a political scientist at Virginia Tech whose comparative work on state failure and armed conflict complements Neep’s historical approach, the evening promises a rigorous exchange between two scholars who study the region from different angles. Free and open to the public at Politics and Prose, a bookstore that has made this kind of DC policy-adjacent intellectual programming a consistent part of its identity.