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Professional Affiliation

Professor, Georgetown University

Expert Bio

Joseph Sassoon is a 2026-2027 ¼ø»Æʦapp Research Fellow. 

Sassoon is a Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown University and holds the al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World. He is a trustee of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford. 

In 2013, his book Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the prestigious British-Kuwait Prize for the best book on the Middle East.

Sassoon completed his Ph.D at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has published extensively on the Middle East. His highly acclaimed fifth book is titled The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire.

¼ø»Æʦapp Project

Iraq and Its Three Wars: The Conflicts that Fundamentally Changed the Middle East and the US Role in the Region

Project Summary

This project, culminating in a book, will dissect Iraq’s three wars between 1980 and 2003 and show how each affected and reshaped the global order. The three wars were the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran War, the First Gulf War, precipitated by the 1990 Invasion of Kuwait, and, finally, the Second Gulf War, which began with the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. These three wars affected not only Iraq but fundamentally reshaped the region’s power structure and, to a great extent, the role of the United States in the Middle East. These three conflicts transformed the Middle East and precipitated key developments, including the ascent of Iran as a major regional power, the rise of authoritarianism in the Arab world, the dominance of sectarianism, not only in the Arab world, but also as far away as Pakistan and Afghanistan, the growth and subsequent decline of American influence in the region, the upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism, the weakening of social contract and last but not least, the transformation of Iraq militarily, economically, and socially.