Dr Daniel Neep
BA (Oxon), MA, PhD (SOAS)
Extension: 3175
Telephone: 01392 723175
Lecturer in International & Middle East Studies
Seconded to the Council for British Research in the Levant (Syria) until September 2013
I am a social scientist who works on state-society relations, authoritarianism, and the politics of social knowledge in the Middle East. My research draws on three disciplinary areas: historical and political sociology, post-colonial critique, and interpretive approaches to social science. My principal empirical focus is Syria and, more recently, Jordan, but I have a broad interest in the comparative politics of the Middle East as a whole (especially Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, Iraq and Iran).
My work on the Middle East begins with the seismic social transformations that swept the region during the twentieth century. My first book (Cambridge University Press, August 2012) argues that colonial state formation in the Middle East was not just shaped by politics, but warped by practices of patterned violence, insurgency, and space. Focusing on the French occupation of Syria, it shows how armed conflict between armed Syrian insurgents and French forces was not simply a threat to colonial rule: it fundamentally transformed how the colonial state understood and organised the society, geography, and population of Syria. The book is based on my doctoral thesis, which won the BRISMES Leigh Douglas Memorial Award presented annually to the best PhD dissertation in Middle East Studies at a British university. BRISMES commented that my doctoral work was of 'striking, first class originality. The research is meticulous, the evidence rich.... The thesis is remarkably lucid and clearly outstanding.'
Having moved back from the colonial to the contemporary Middle East, I am now working on two new areas of research. The first focuses on the concept of 'authoritarianism' in political science, especially as it is used in relation to the Arab world. In this context I organised a project workshop entitled 'Interpreting Authoritarianism: Politics, Practices, Meanings' in September 2010 with funding from a British Academy Small Research Grant. My second project, 'Mapping the Social Sciences in Jordan', commenced in January 2012 and is funded by research awards from BASIS (the British Academy Sponsored Institutes and Schools programme) and the CBRL.
I am currently on secondment to the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) as Research Director (Syria). I was until recently based in Damascus, where I was working towards establishing a British research institute to join the British Academy's network of institutes across Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. Now based at the British Institute in Amman, I follow developments in Syria closely and am leading a new research project on social research in Jordan. I am also leading the strategy to develop Arabic language training for researchers in the humanities and the social sciences across CBRL institutes in the Middle East. This initiative is supported by an institutional grant from the British Academy's Languages and Quantitative Skills Programme. Coupled with the new CBRL-BRISMES Research Network on 'The Middle East after the Arab Uprisings' and its existing fellowships scheme, which enables British academics and PhD researchers to work in the region, the CBRL plays an important role in supporting UK social science research on the contemporary Middle East.
During my secondment I continue to supervise postgraduate research students in the Politics department. Although I am particularly interested in supervising PhD students on topics related to Syria and its neighbouring countries, I am happy to consider supervising projects on other countries and regions that coincide with my theoretical interests. I have supervised or second-supervised doctoral research on Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Kyrgyzstan, amongst other places. I welcome students who are interested in producing high-quality empirical research by actively developing their expertise in qualitative methodology and the principles of social scientific research before departing for fieldwork. Unfortunately I do not teach undergraduate or Masters' students.
I am an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and was an Associate Researcher at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient. I previously taught Middle East politics at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Before my academic career I was Head of the Middle East Programme at a major UK thinktank, where I looked at British foreign policy and contemporary Middle East politics. Having worked in policy for several years, I now thoroughly appreciate the space for independent, critical thinking that universities provide.
