Countries of Expertise: Syria (and to a lesser extent Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey).
I write books and articles about the political, military, economic, social and cultural conditions in Syria. My most recent book is The Blood Between Us: Syria’s Revolutionary Transition (Saqi, 2026). My journalism has been published at The Guardian, New Lines Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Unherd, Al Jazeera, the New Statesman and other outlets. The BBC and others have frequently interviewed me on Syria.
I am also the chief English editor of the Syria Prisons Museum and the ISIS Prisons Museum; these are documentation projects producing evidence of crimes in prisons run by the Assad regime and ISIS for use in trials and for wider justice and accountability purposes.
As well as prisons, I focus on transitional justice, militias, sectarianism, and political and economic development.
I lived in Syria in the late 1990s, working for the British Council, and continued to visit regularly until the 2011 uprising. I visited Idlib for journalistic and humanitarian purposes several times in 2013. I have since kept in touch with Syrian political and civil society actors. As a researcher, writer and editor for the Prisons Museum I have worked extensively on issues connected to citizen journalism, documentation of war crimes, detention, torture, surveillance, and transitional justice. This work has led to cooperation with organisations like the UN’s International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism as well as with Syrian-led NGOs and the international media. I was a member of the editorial team designing and presenting the “Three Walls: Spatial Narratives of Old Mosul” exhibition at UNESCO headquarters in November 2024.
My own research and journalism interests cover sectarian conflicts, local democracy, state-building, the arts, and wider cultural issues. I was able to make several research trips to Syria in spring and summer 2025, and to interview a range of security and economic experts as well as ordinary people. In November I spoke about transitional justice with Amnesty International’s Agnes Callamard at the National Museum in Damascus.
I have experience writing reports for legal cases. I also have experience evaluating book proposals.
The Blood Between Us: Syria’s Revolutionary Transition. Saqi Books, 2026.
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. Pluto Press, 2016. (shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize)
The Road from Damascus, a novel. Hamish Hamilton 2008, Penguin 2009.
Short stories and essays in several collections, including Syria Speaks (Saqi Books, 2014) and Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East (Profile Books, 2015)
Essays in the Critical Muslim, published by C. Hurst & Co, 2011 - 2026
Ethnic Groups Expertise: