News – Center for International and Regional Studies

Race & Society, Regional Studies

CIRS 2025 in the Media

3 November 2025

Selected news articles and media coverage of the project will be posted here. Seeing Sudan: Politics Through Art conference and Sudan Retold Exhbition at Alhosh Gallery, Doha The Seeing Sudan:…

A Successful FIFA World Cup 2022: How Qatar Proved its Critics Wrong and Can Continue to do so

14 December 2022

Qatar has proved its critics wrong: the small state showed that it is capable of successfully organizing the world’s biggest sporting event, the FIFA men’s World Cup, after the setbacks…

Analyzing Arab-Israeli Tensions at the Qatar World Cup 2022

6 December 2022

Despite the Israeli team not playing in the FIFA 2022 World Cup, the presence of Israeli sports fans and journalists has made some headlines. Although not all forms of activism…

What is Distinctively Qatari about the World Cup 2022? An Expat Perspective

10 November 2022

Even though the World Cup 2022™ is a historic opportunity for the Middle East to leave its indelible mark on the history of football, the tournament has a distinctively Qatari…

Qatar’s Foreign Policy and the 2022 World Cup

24 October 2022

Blog 34 By Hissa Al-Kubaisi. After a bidding process that began in 2009 and ended in 2010, Qatar won the rights to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Although this…

The 2022 World Cup, Post-Colonial Narratives, and Sports Diplomacy

16 October 2022

On December 10, 2010, Qatar, a small, wealthy state in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), became the first Arab and Muslim country to be selected as the host of the…

Football and Technology: The 2022 FIFA World Cup will be Qatar’s Chance to Show its “Cool” Stadiums

28 September 2022

The upcoming World Cup in Qatar will be groundbreaking in many ways when the host nation takes on Ecuador on November 20 at the Al Bayt Stadium. Aside from being…

The Qatar World Cup, Vision 2030, and Women’s Empowerment

19 September 2022

Prior to winning the bid for the 2022 World Cup, Qatar did not have a women’s national football team. In 2010, the same year that Qatar won the bid, the…

The Gulf’s Future in International Sport Just Got a Big Boost (from Vladimir Putin)

4 September 2022

Aside from the increasing media attention towards the World Cup in Qatar, one of the most important international sports stories of the year, certainly for this region, broke last week…

The World Cup and the Utopian Promise of Upholding Human Rights

21 August 2022

Central to issues of national identity and state-building, modern sports are not just about the physical activity of “playing the game,” they are also subject to the “politics of the…