Rubin was a deputy director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA).

He has been a Fulbright and a Council on Foreign Relations/National Endowment for the Humanities International Affairs Fellow; a U.S. Institute of Peace, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Leonard Davis Center grantee; a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Johns Hopkins University Foreign Policy Institute (where he directed the program on terrorism funded by the Ford and the Bradley Foundations), and Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He has edited five books on terrorism, the three-volume collection Political Islam, an eight-volume introductory book series to the Middle East, Iraq After Saddam, The Region at the Center of the World: Crises and Quandaries in the Contemporary Persian Gulf; Revolutionaries and Reformers: Contemporary Islamist Movements in the Middle East; Critical Essays on Israeli, Society, Politics, and Culture; and From War to Peace, 1973-1993.

He is married to Judith Colp Rubin, with whom he co-wrote A History (2004) and co-edited a related collection of essays entitled Loathing America (2004).

Some of his other co-edited books include Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East; The Israel Arab Reader; The Armed Forces in the Contemporary Middle East; America and Its Allies; Turkey in World Politics; Political Parties in Turkey; Turkey and the European Union, Turkey's Economy in Crisis, Iraq's Road to War; The Central American Crisis Reader; and The Human Rights Reader and Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Rubin has written more than 40 book chapters, among them: "U.S. Middle East Policy, 1993", in Ami Ayalon, Middle East Contemporary Survey, 1993; "U.S.-Israel Relations and Israel's 1992 Elections", in Asher Arian and Michal Shamir, Elections in Israel; "The U.S. and Iraq" and "The PLO and Iraq", in Amatzia Baram and Barry Rubin, Iraq's Road to War; "Religion in International Politics", in Douglas Johnson and Cynthia Samson, Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft; "The PLO After the Gulf Crisis", in Robb Satloff, The Politics of Change in the Middle East; "The Middle East in 1993", in Yoshiki Hidaka, Prospects for 1993 (in Japanese); and "U.S. Middle East Policy and the Intifada", in Gad Gilbar and Asher Susser, At the Core of the Conflict (in Hebrew).

He is the editor of two book series: The Middle East in Focus (Palgrave-Macmillan); and Military and Strategic Issues in the Middle East (Taylor & Francis).

His recently-completed books are The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-MacMillan, April 2007) and the three-volume collection Political Islam (Routledge), "The Future of the Middle East" (Sharpe, in press). His recently-edited works include "Iraq After Saddam" (Sharpe, in press), "Global Survey of Islamism" (Sharpe, in press), and an eight-volume introductory book series to the Middle East (Sharpe, in press).

Rubin is a frequent contributor to the Middle East column in The Jerusalem Post. His articles have also appeared frequently in such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Journal of Democracy, Middle East Quarterly, The National Interest, The Washington Quarterly, The New Republic, and others.

He has been a guest on such television programs as This Week with David Brinkley, Nightline, Face the Nation, The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, The Larry King Show, and others on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Among the newspapers around the world for which he has written are La Vanguardia in Spain, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany; The National Post and The Globe and Mail in Canada; La Opinión, Liberal Forum, and Limes in Italy; The Age, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian Financial Review in Australia; Zaman, Referens, and Radikal in Turkey; and The Pioneer in India.

Books

• The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley, November 4, 2005). ISBN 978-0471739012.
• The Tragedy of the Middle East (Cambridge University Press; September 15, 2002). ISBN 978-0521806237 (13).
• The Transformation of Palestinian Politics: From Revolution to State-Building (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, October 1999).
• A History (Oxford University Press, August 28, 2004). ISBN 0-19-516773-2. (Co-written with Judith Colp Rubin).
• Loathing America. (Herzliya, Israel: The Global Research in International Affairs [GLORIA] Center, 2004). Co-edited with Judith Colp Rubin.
• Cauldron of Turmoil: America in the Middle East.
• Modern Dictators: Third World Coupmakers, Strongmen, and Populist Tyrants.
• Assimilation and Its Discontents.
• Revolution Until Victory: The Politics and History of the PLO.
• Istanbul Intrigues.
• Secrets of State: The State Department and the Struggle over U.S. Foreign Policy.
• Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran.
• Arab States and the Palestine Conflict.
• Islamic Fundamentalists in Egyptian Politics.
• The Great Powers in the Middle East, 1941-1947.
• International News & the American Media.