Joseph A. Kéchichian

Joseph A Kéchichian is a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the CEO of Kéchichian & Associates, LLC, a consulting partnership that provides analysis on the Arabian/Persian Gulf region; and a senior writer with the Dubai-based Gulf News, which is the top-ranked English-language news daily in the United Arab Emirates. http://www.gulfnews.com. He served as the honorary consul of the Sultanate of Oman in Los Angeles, California between 2006 and 2011.

Dr. Kéchichian received his doctorate in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1985, where he also taught and assumed the assistant deanship in international studies. In the summer of 1989, he was a Hoover fellow at Stanford University. He has also worked at RAND Corporation as an associate political scientist and as a lecturer at fellow at UCLA.

Dr. Kéchichian has written and published several books, including Legal and Political Reforms in Sa‘udi Arabia, Political Participation and Stability in the Sultanate of Oman, and Oman and the World: The Emergence of an Independent Foreign Policy. He also edited A Century in Thirty Years: Shaykh Zayed and the United Arab Emirates.

The Middle East Institute in Washington, DC welcomed Kéchichian as a non-resident fellow in 2009-2010 and is hosting him once again in 2012-2013 to work on a new project on the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Dr. Kéchichian is a frequent participant on radio and television programs and has appeared on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour to comment on developments in the Gulf crises. He has also appeared on Al Jazeera English, the BBC, and WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate. A frequent traveler to the Gulf region, Dr. Kéchichian is fluent in Arabic, Armenian, English, French, Italian, Turkish, and is learning Persian.