Malik Siraj Akbar

Malik Siraj Akbar is a journalist, political analyst and communications specialist based in Washington D.C. He is the founder and the Editor-in-Chief of the Baloch Hal, Pakistans first hyper-local online newspaper and editor of the liberal Urdu news magazine Enkaar. Akbar was a 2012 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and, a 2010-11 Fulbright Hubert. H. Humphrey Fellow at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Akbar is the author of Pakistan: A Broken Democracy (2015) and the Redefined Dimensions of Baloch Nationalist Movement. In 2006-2010, Akbar served as the Bureau Chief of Pakistan's liberal English language publications, Daily Times, and The Friday Times in the country's largest province of Balochistan. Akbar's struggle for press freedom in his native Pakistan has been profiled by CNN, BBC World and the Washington Post. Newsweek Pakistan called Akbar "the star Baloch reporter of his generation" while Huffington Post Live termed him a "real mouthpiece for the oppressed." Akbar has a Master's degree in Public Administration from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was elected as the Vice President Communications in the Student Government and served as the Online Editor of The Citizen, the campus newspaper. As the first Pakistani recipient of the South Asia Foundation Media Scholarship, Akbar earned a Post-Graduate Diploma in Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism in India in 2006. He serves on the Board of the South Asian Journalists Association(SAJA).Email: baloch@post.harvard.edu