Joseph Albert Kéchichian (born March 15, 1954) is a political scientist.

Kéchichian received his doctorate in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1985, where he also taught (1986-1988), and assumed the assistant deanship in international studies (1988-1989). In the summer of 1989, he was a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University (under the U.S. State Department Title VIII Program). Between 1990 and 1996, he labored at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation as an Associate Political Scientist, and was a lecturer at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

Between 1998 and 2001, Kéchichian was a fellow at UCLA’s Gustav E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, where he held a Smith Richardson Foundation grant (1998-1999) to compose Succession in Saudi Arabia and Beirut and London: Dar Al Saqi, 2002, 2003. He published Political Participation and Stability in the Sultanate of Oman, Dubai: Gulf Research Center, 2005, Oman and the World: The Emergence of an Independent Foreign Policy, and edited A Century in Thirty Years: Shaykh Zayed and the United Arab Emirates (Washington, D.C.: The Middle East Policy Council), as well as Iran, Iraq, and the Arab Gulf States. In 2003, he co-authored, with R. Hrair Dekmejian at USC, The Just Prince: A Manual of Leadership, which includes a full translation of the Sulwan al-Muta` by Muhammad Ibn Zafar al-Siqilli.

In 2008, he published two studies, Power and Succession in Arab Monarchies (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, and Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyes Books, 2012—in 2 volumes for the Arabic translation]), and Faysal: Saudi Arabia’s King for All Seasons Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida and Beirut: Dar al-‘Arabiyyah lil-Mawsu‘at, 2012]. His newest book is Legal and Political Reforms in Sa‘udi Arabia, published by Routledge in December 2012. He published a companion volume to Faysal on ‘Iffat Al Thunayan: An Arabian Queen.