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The 41st summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which took place in the Saudi heritage site of Al-Ula on January 5, 2021, briefly diverted attention, especially in the US,…

Two years ahead of the first FIFA World Cup in the Muslim world the existing narratives surrounding it are far from reaching common ground, let alone converging on an optimum…

Of all the legacies one might hope for from the 2022 World Cup, one would be media liberalization in Qatar. The country has a 52-year-old media law whose potentially limitless…

Sport has become a major tool for foreign policy and an important way of developing a country’s soft power. A nation can make a statement in its international diplomacy by…

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…