A History of Modern Syria

Autorentext

Daniel Neep is a scholar of Middle Eastern politics and society. He is Senior Fellow and Director of Publications at Arab Center Washington DC and has taught Middle East politics at George Washington University, Georgetown University, and the University of Exeter. He was previously Assistant Research Director and a Non-resident Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, and Research Director for Syria at the Council for British Research in the Levant. He spent several years living in Syria and Jordan. He is the author of Occupying Syria under the French Mandate: Insurgency, Space, and State Formation.

Klappentext

Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was then brutally ruled by France. This French 'mandate' carved out new borders with equally provisional neighbours in a process that pulled apart families, trade networks and political assumptions that had already been ravaged by the war.

Syria's subsequent history has been a series of attempts to make sense of its borders, including a failed attempt in the late 1950s to unite with Egypt and several humiliations at the hands of Israel's armed forces. The civil war that broke out in 2011 plunged Syria into a nightmarish series of disasters, including the terrible years of Islamic State, ultimately resulting in the reimposition of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship, which came to an end in 2024.

Daniel Neep's remarkable book creates a gripping, intelligent narrative of how Syrians have lived through these events, never losing sight either of the fates of ordinary people or of Syria's rich, complex and diverse society, unwillingly or willingly brought together in such a highly contested space.