Foreign Policy Research Institute A Nation Must Think Before it Acts Engaging Arab Audiences

Engaging Arab Audiences

  • May 12, 2014
Private: Joseph Braude

Senior Fellow - Middle East Program

Senior Fellow, Al-Mesbar Studies and Research Center


The Arab media landscape today is as crowded and complex as that of any region of the world – with local, regional, and international broadcasts in Arabic beaming into the region from China to Russia to Israel and the Americas – and from transnational movements ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Vatican. For the United States, reaching and engaging Arab audiences at this time of pivotal change is a national security priority – but with unprecedented competition in the marketplace of ideas, it’s getting harder and harder.

Joseph BraudeJoseph Braude, now at work on a book about Arabic media, will share with us his research on the cutting edge of strategic communications in North Africa and the Middle East, from the unusually seasoned perspective of an American Middle East expert who writes and broadcasts in the language himself. An FPRI’s Senior Fellow, 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 at the University of Tehran. He is the author of two books, The New Iraq (Basic Books, 2003), and The Honored Dead (Random House – Spiegel & Grau, 2011). Since 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, writes a biweekly column in Al-Majalla, the largest-distribution magazine in the Arabic language, and contributes regularly to the daily newspaper Asharq Alawsat. He is a fellow at the Al-Mesbar Studies and Research Center in Dubai and a visiting fellow at the National Strategy Information Center in Washington.

Download Link
Engaging Arab Audiences (Audio)
Related Program(s)

Middle East Program

Related Multimedia(s)

Saudi Youth for Scientific Reasoning, Civil Discourse