Doha Debates Reflects on a Landmark Year of Global Dialogue and Youth Engagement

In 2025, Qatar Foundation’s Doha Debates strengthened its role as a global platform for truth-seeking dialogue, bringing students and leading thinkers together to explore ideas shaping today’s most urgent questions––from freedom and justice to identity and belonging. Its reach continued to grow, surpassing 13.8 million video views and engaging nearly seven million followers across social platforms, including more than one million YouTube subscribers.

A major milestone came with season four of The Negotiators, which earned international recognition, winning the Folio Award for Historical Reporting and the Shorty Award for News & Politics Podcast.

Alongside its live programming, Doha Debates released a new season of its flagship debates online, reaching global audiences with Majlis-style conversations on freedom, justice, identity and belonging.

Throughout the year, Doha Debates convened a series of international town halls that brought students into direct conversation with leading global thinkers. A sold-out event at the Bradford Literature Festival explored national identity and belonging, moderated by Malika Bilal and featuring Dr. Wael B. Hallaq, Dr. Shashi Tharoor and Dr. David Engels. The dialogue then expanded to Latin America with the organization’s first regional town hall in Buenos Aires, presented in partnership with Years of Culture, where students from Qatar, Argentina, and Chile debated the future of cities, alongside Guadalupe Granero Realini, Akel Ismail Kahera and Nicholas Boys Smith.

Doha Debates later returned to Doha, convening students with Dr. Omar Suleiman, Dr. Gregg Caruso and Professor Jeremy Koons to examine how science, faith and philosophy shape justice and moral responsibility. The year concluded at the Doha Forum with a live episode of The Negotiators, in partnership with Foreign Policy and the International Peace Institute, featuring Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad bin Zeid Al Hussein and Dr. Robert Malley, offering rare public insight into diplomacy and peacebuilding.

Youth engagement remained central throughout the year. Through town halls, Community of Practice training initiatives and the Doha Debates Ambassador Program, more than 400 young people from over 80 nations participated annually in dialogue-driven leadership development. Participation has grown from 30 participants in the program’s first year to a capacity of up to 200 ambassadors.

In 2026, Doha Debates builds on this momentum with a new Doha Debates Podcast season, opening with “Has disagreement become disinformation?” featuring Glenn Greenwald, Renée DiResta and Siva Vaidhyanathan, alongside town halls, another flagship show season, and the continuing season of The Negotiators.

About Doha Debates

Doha Debates engages a vanguard of intellectually curious truth-seekers to constructively debate differences in order to build a better future. We emphasize unity over division, encouraging conversations that bring us together rather than drive us apart.

Learn more at DohaDebates.com