Musa Al-Gharbi

Musa al-Gharbi is a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology. Broadly, his research explores how we think about, talk about, and produce knowledge about social phenomena including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests.

Prior to joining Columbia Sociology, Musa obtained a B.A. in Near Eastern Studies, a M.A. in Philosophy and taught classes in Political Science at the University of Arizona. His work, accordingly, draws on methods and theories from a range of disciplines -- and has been published and cited in academic journals and textbooks across a range of disciplines.

Musa is also deeply committed to engaging policymakers and the public. His work has been published or featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, New Republic, CNN and many other popular outlets -- as well as in publications by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Army War College, the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), the Brookings Institute, RAND Corporation and beyond. 

al-Gharbi, Musa (under contract). We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rozado, David, Musa al-Gharbi & Jamin Halberstadt (2021). “Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse: A Chronological Analysis.” Social Science Computer Review. DOI: 10.1177/08944393211031452

Rozado, David & Musa al-Gharbi (2021). “Using Word Embeddings to Probe Sentiment Associations of Politically-Loaded Terms in News and Opinion Articles from News Outlets.” Journal of Computational Social Science. DOI: 10.1007/s42001-021-00130-y

al-Gharbi, Musa (2021). “People of the Book: Empire and Social Science in the Islamic Commonwealth Period.” Socius 7. DOI: 10.1177/23780231211021200.

Smith, Benjamin w/ Andrea Figueroa-Caballero, Musa al-Gharbi & Michael Stohl (2020). “Do You Know Your Enemy? The Role of Known Actors as Framing Devices in News Media.” International Journal of Communication 14: 4717-4738.

al-Gharbi, Musa (2019). “Resistance as Sacrifice: Towards an Ascetic Antiracism.” Sociological Forum 34(S1): 1197-1216.

Smith, Benjamin w/ Michael Stohl & Musa al-Gharbi (2019). “Discourses on Countering Violent Extremism: The Strategic Interplay Between Fear and Security After 9/11.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 12(1): 151-168.

al-Gharbi, Musa (2018). “Race and the Race for the White House: On Social Research in the Age of Trump.” The American Sociologist 49(4): 496-519.

al-Gharbi, Musa (2016). “From Political Liberalism to Para-Liberalism: Epistemological Pluralism, Cognitive Liberalism & Authentic Choice.” Comparative Philosophy 7(2).

al-Gharbi, Musa (2013). “Syria, Contextualized: The Numbers Game.” Middle East Policy 20(1): 56-67.