[2] He was a Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in London until December 2008, and later a research associate with the peace-building NGO Conciliation Resources.

From 2010 to 2015, de Waal worked as a Senior Associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specialising primarily in the South Caucasus region.

[5] In 2014, de Waal had provided the introduction to Two Close Peoples, Two Distant Neighbours, a book collecting the major writings on Armenian-Turkish relations by Hrant Dink.

In 2021, he was criticised in an open letter addressed to Carnegie Europe and signed by fourteen scholars, including Henry Theriault, Bedross Der Matossian, Elyse Semerdjian, and Marc A. Mamigonian for his article "What Next After the U.S.

[13][14] De Waal has written the introduction to Anna Politkovskaya's first book in English, A Dirty War (2004), which describes the atrocities and abuses of that conflict.