Alex Simon (Edited by) is a researcher, writer, and co-founder of Synaps, a Beirut-based research and training center that conducts intensive fieldwork on socioeconomic trends in the Middle East and broader Mediterranean. From 2017 to 2024, he coordinated Synaps’s team of Syrian researchers working across Syria and neighboring countries. His current research focuses on human mobility, environmental stress, and transnational economic interdependence. He holds a Bachelor’s from Princeton University and an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.Matthieu Rey (Afterword by) is a CNRS researcher specializing in contemporary Middle Eastern history, with a special focus on Syria’s and Iraq’s political systems and formerly director of contemporary studies at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO), Beirut. He is also an associate researcher at the Collège de France and the Wits History Workshop. He is the author of When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East: Iraq and Syria, 1946–63 (AUC Press, 2022). Peter Harling (Afterword by) is the founder and director of Synaps. He has lived and worked in the Arab world since 1998. He first visited Syria that year, and was based in Damascus between 2006 and 2014. He advised Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi in their attempts to launch a peace process in Syria.
