Books by Daniel Neep
Chapters & Articles by Daniel Neep
International Affairs, 2021
Scholars of Middle East politics have been reluctant to explore how the long nineteenth century h... more Scholars of Middle East politics have been reluctant to explore how the long nineteenth century has shaped the region's political development. The reason for this neglect, I argue, is a common understanding of Ottoman decline and failed modernization, which suggests that the story of modern politics in the Middle East commences with colonial partition after the First World War. But what if political scientists are getting the story wrong? In this article, I argue that our background assumptions about the political development of the Middle East reflect outdated understandings that historians themselves have long left behind. Drawing on this revisionist Ottoman historiography, I show that key dynamics in Middle East politics today—such as state-building and sectarian identities—originate not in the era ushered in by the Sykes–Picot Accord, but in the transformations of the long nineteenth century. By overlooking the evolution of late Ottoman politics and their historical legacies, political scientists risk misdiagnosing key dynamics in the region's political development. ‘Bringing the Ottomans back in’ highlights to policy-makers the importance of the extra-institutional dimensions of statebuilding in the Middle East, and opens up new vistas for research in comparative–historical political science.
New Political Economy, 2018
During crises, ideas play a decisive role in shaping radical paradigm shifts in economic governan... more During crises, ideas play a decisive role in shaping radical paradigm shifts in economic governance. However, not all crises immediately produce such ‘great transformations’. Why do some ideas result in incremental rather than abrupt change after crisis? To identify mechanisms potentially explaining this variation, I conduct an exploratory process tracing of an understudied case of incremental institutional change: post-independence Syria. Competing political actors in Syria converged on identical policy responses to crisis despite their very different interpretations of its causes. Although power oscillated between these increasingly bitter rivals in the early 1950s, their ideational consensus on economic issues nevertheless led to a decade of steady institutional change that transformed previously fragile government institutions into powerful vehicles of statism. I derive from this analysis the potential causal significance of two new variables – crisis narrative and crisis response – and hypothesise that their configuration can explain variation in post-crisis patterns of institutional change. Ideas can explain not only the new direction of economic governance after crisis, but also the speed and scale of its movement.
Published in the Journal of Historical Sociology : https://t.co/Zm334jkkWT
Neo-Weberian historic... more Published in the Journal of Historical Sociology : https://t.co/Zm334jkkWT
Neo-Weberian historical sociology and political science establishes that territory is a defining feature of the modern state. Drawing on insights from political geography, I argue that ‘territory’ is not a pre-existing physical location, but an effect produced by state practices and technologies. The spatial fetish of territory, moreover, distracts analytical attention from the equally important non-territorial dimensions of the state. To map these new and unfamiliar dimensions, I propose three analogies from the study of physics - wormholes, gravitational fields, and quantum entanglement - as powerful conceptual devices with the potential to reorient social scientists towards a fuller understanding of state-space.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Nov 2013
Historical sociology has long been concerned with the study of organized state violence. 1 Since ... more Historical sociology has long been concerned with the study of organized state violence. 1 Since the mid-1970s, a substantial body of work has come to focus on the importance of warfare to historical processes of state formation. The first generation of this literature proposed that the relentless existential struggle between the warring polities of medieval Europe had favored the survival of states that could adopt ever more efficient means to extract and mobilize resources from the local population to feed the war effort. Early states therefore evolved the institutions to collect taxes and administer territory largely as a functional byproduct of interstate military competition. From this perspective, the logic of war making was the driving force behind the rise of the modern state in Europe. 2 Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa swiftly objected that European models of bellicist state formation could not be neatly transposed to other regions of the world. As Ian Lustick pointed out, the fact that external powers policed the post-World War I division of the region effectively removed state expansion through warfare from the options available to local political leaders. 3 Yet even if the same relationship between war making and state making does not obtain in the Middle East, the work of scholars such as Steven Heydemann, Michael Barnett, Toby Dodge, and Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp reminds us that warfare is not an isolated event that unfolds on the distant frontline but rather a large-scale assembly of practices that differentially structures the organization of state-society relations. 4 War is not merely a political act, but an intrinsically sociological process.
Intrasformazione: Rivista di storia della idee, 2013
Middle East Policy, Jan 1, 2004
Book Reviews by Daniel Neep
MERIP online , 2020
A review of Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (... more A review of Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
Middle East Journal, 2018
Political Studies Review, May 2014
Millenium: Journal of International Studies, Jan 1, 2006
Interviews by Daniel Neep
On the tenth anniversary of the start of the conflict in Syria, the Crown Center for Middle Easte... more On the tenth anniversary of the start of the conflict in Syria, the Crown Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University spoke with Daniel Neep, non-resident fellow at the Crown Center and the American Druze Foundation Research Fellow in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, about its origins, potential conclusion, and the government that continues to rule
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Books by Daniel Neep
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What role does military force play during a colonial occupation? The answer seems obvious: coercion crushes local resistance, quashes political dissent and consolidates the dominance of the occupying power. Yet violence can also have more subtle and more ambiguous consequences.
This discerning and theoretically rigorous study focuses on Syria during the French Mandate from 1920 to 1946, a turbulent period in which conflict between armed Syrian insurgents and French military forces not only determined the strategic objectives of the colonial state, but also transformed how the colonial state organised, controlled and understood Syrian society, geography and population. The book shows how, in addition to the coercive techniques of air power, collective punishment and colonial policing, civilian technologies such as urban planning and engineering were commandeered in the effort to undermine rebel advances.
In this way colonial violence had a lasting effect in Syria, shaping a peculiar form of social order that endured well beyond the French occupation."
Chapters & Articles by Daniel Neep
Neo-Weberian historical sociology and political science establishes that territory is a defining feature of the modern state. Drawing on insights from political geography, I argue that ‘territory’ is not a pre-existing physical location, but an effect produced by state practices and technologies. The spatial fetish of territory, moreover, distracts analytical attention from the equally important non-territorial dimensions of the state. To map these new and unfamiliar dimensions, I propose three analogies from the study of physics - wormholes, gravitational fields, and quantum entanglement - as powerful conceptual devices with the potential to reorient social scientists towards a fuller understanding of state-space.
Book Reviews by Daniel Neep
Interviews by Daniel Neep
Purchase hardback with 20% discount (UK):
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/discountpromotion/?site_locale=en_GB&code=NEEP12
What role does military force play during a colonial occupation? The answer seems obvious: coercion crushes local resistance, quashes political dissent and consolidates the dominance of the occupying power. Yet violence can also have more subtle and more ambiguous consequences.
This discerning and theoretically rigorous study focuses on Syria during the French Mandate from 1920 to 1946, a turbulent period in which conflict between armed Syrian insurgents and French military forces not only determined the strategic objectives of the colonial state, but also transformed how the colonial state organised, controlled and understood Syrian society, geography and population. The book shows how, in addition to the coercive techniques of air power, collective punishment and colonial policing, civilian technologies such as urban planning and engineering were commandeered in the effort to undermine rebel advances.
In this way colonial violence had a lasting effect in Syria, shaping a peculiar form of social order that endured well beyond the French occupation."
Neo-Weberian historical sociology and political science establishes that territory is a defining feature of the modern state. Drawing on insights from political geography, I argue that ‘territory’ is not a pre-existing physical location, but an effect produced by state practices and technologies. The spatial fetish of territory, moreover, distracts analytical attention from the equally important non-territorial dimensions of the state. To map these new and unfamiliar dimensions, I propose three analogies from the study of physics - wormholes, gravitational fields, and quantum entanglement - as powerful conceptual devices with the potential to reorient social scientists towards a fuller understanding of state-space.
The first part of the course looks at how the Arab world itself has sought to answer the question – ‘who are the Arabs?’ - from the cultural revival of the Nahda to the radical nationalisms of the 20th century to 21st century identity politics, social media, and the new generation of Arab youth.
The second part of the course looks at the politics of knowledge: what concepts, approaches, and paradigms have scholars in the West used to study the Arab world - and how does this foreign scholarship relate to contemporary geopolitics? We also consider the varied forms that politics may take under conditions of limited freedoms. Additionally, we will consider representations of the Arab Middle East & North Africa in popular culture, including tv, film, novels, and video games.