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When constructing new sports stadiums, there has long been a mantra that “if you build it, they will come.” In essence, this means that crowds will instinctively be drawn to…

Read the latest publication by Zahra Babar, CIRS Associate Director for Research, on “Migrant Workers Bear the Pandemic’s Brunt in the Gulf,” Current History (December 2020). In the article, Babar…

Why has the Qatar women’s national football team not succeeded? My research on women’s football in Qatar might shed some light on the issue.[1] While the Qatar Women’s Sports Committee…

With the 2022 World Cup in Qatar only two years away, and a resolution of the three-year-old Gulf rift nowhere in sight, government officials, soccer governance executives, and pundits are…

On October 6, 2020, Zahra Babar, CIRS Associate Director for Research, participated at a roundtable on “Citizenship and Belonging in the Arabian Peninsula”. The roundtable was held as part of the…

The specter of national identity has lingered more intensely over Qatar’s national football team than any other national team in recent years.[1] The common claim often portrayed in the Western media…

This article was originally published under the title “Op-ed: Why the Education City Stadium is built to last,” by Qatar Foundation Community Story. The Education City Stadium, which was officially opened in…

As part of a new CIRS research initiative, Building a Legacy: Qatar FIFA World Cup 2022, best selling British author, journalist, and sociologist, David Goldblatt, delieverd a lecture titled “The 2022…

The COVID-19 pandemic shares a number of structural similarities with the great environmental crises that define our time—climate change and biodiversity loss—inviting a slew of reasoned comparisons between planetary disasters.…