This episode of The Dig with Dan Denvir features Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad on the historical and geopolitical origins of Asad’s rise and fall — and what might happen next. Denvir and Haddad think through the contradictions: honoring the joy felt by Syrians at Asad’s ouster while simultaneously taking stock of a truly bad geopolitical outcome.
Featuring
Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
Dan Denvir is the author of All-American Nativism (forthcoming from Verso), Visiting Fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute, a writer in residence at The Appeal, and the host of The Dig podcast on Jacobin Radio. He is a former staff writer at Salon and the Philadelphia City Paper, and former contributing writer at the Atlantic’s CityLab. Denvir's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Vox, Jacobin, The Guardian’s Comment Is Free, Al Jazeera America, VICE, and The New Republic.