Steven Heydemann is a political scientist who specializes in the comparative politics and the political economy of the Middle East. He holds the Janet Wright Ketcham Chair in Middle East Studies at Smith College, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government. He is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution. Among his many publications are :Syrian Regime Resilience and State Power Through Contracting Stateness: The Cases of al-Hasakeh and Aleppo, with Reinoud Leenders (Aljabassini & Daher, eds., Syria Transformed: State, Society, and Economy in the Shadow of War (Forthcoming IB Tauris); “Rethinking Social Contracts in the MENA Region: Economic Governance, Contingent Citizenship, and State-Society Relations After the Arab Uprisings.” World Development (2020); “The Syrian Conflict: Proxy War, Pyrrhic Victory, and Power Sharing Agreements.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (2020); “No Exit: Conflict, Economic Governance, and Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Fierce States,” in Luigi Narbone, ed., Fractured Stability: War Economies and Reconstruction in the MENA (2019); “Beyond Fragility: Syria and the Challenges of Reconstruction in Fierce States” (Brookings Institution, 2018). and “Civil War, Economic Governance, and State Reconstruction in the Arab Middle East,” (Daedalus 2018).