Dr. Joseph Braude

Broadcasting Change: Arabic Media as a Catalyst for Change

Sponsor:
The Reading Eagle Company

Joseph Braude, a Senior Fellow with FPRI’s Program on the Middle East, is a Middle East scholar and author whose research appears in print and on air, in Arabic as well as English. He studied in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. He developed his Arabic to broadcast quality through years of living and working in the Gulf states and North Africa, and added fluency in Farsi to his knowledge of Persian literature as a graduate student at the University of Tehran.

His first book, The New Iraq (Basic Books, 2003), examines the challenge of civil society development in the country following the US-led invasion. His second, The Honored Dead (Random House – Spiegel & Grau, 2011), presents an unprecedented investigation of the inner workings of an Arab security service: Braude was embedded for half a year in an investigative unit of the Moroccan federal police in Casablanca, where he read case files, attended interrogations, and accompanied police on nighttime forays into the shantytown.

Since July 2010, Joseph Braude’s weekly program in Arabic, Risalat New York (Letter from New York), has aired nationally on Morocco’s MED Radio. He appears frequently as a commentator on Al-Arabiya and other satellite television networks. He writes a biweekly column in Al-Majalla, the largest-distribution magazine in the Arabic language, and contributes regularly to the daily newspaper Asharq Alawsat. In the United States, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. He provides commentary on public radio programs, and produces documentaries on current affairs in the Middle East for PRI’s America Abroad. He hosts the English-language podcast Eye on Arabia, a light-hearted roundup of reporting and analysis from the Arab world. He is also a contributing editor at Tablet.

Joseph Braude is Advisor at the Al-Mesbar Studies and Research Center in Dubai, a think tank specializing in Islamist movements across the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to leading seminars and contributing research to its monthly book, he conducts outreach on behalf of the Center in the United States and elsewhere.

As a consulting advisor, Joseph Braude has assisted non-profit groups, government, and private companies in matters related to Middle East policy, public diplomacy, security sector reform, and counterterrorism. He has worked with the United States Agency for International Development, the US State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, and Pyramid Research.