Doha Debates Podcast Returns for a New Season Exploring the Ideas Shaping Our World

The 20-episode season, launched September 22, builds on questions raised in flagship debates and global town halls through long-form conversations.

Qatar Foundation’s Doha Debates has launched a new season of the Doha Debates Podcast, with 20 episodes airing weekly through February 16, 2027. The series brings leading global thinkers together to debate some of the world’s most complex and challenging issues.

The podcast carries forward themes from its flagship debates and town halls through long-form conversations, reflecting Doha Debates’ commitment to open, truth-seeking dialogue exploring global issues with depth, nuance and respect for diverse perspectives.

The opening episode, “Will China or the West lead the world into the future?” moderated by Soraya Salam, brings together Renata Ávila, CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation; Arnaud Bertrand, entrepreneur; Isabel Hilton, visiting professor at the Lau China Institute, King’s College, London; and Henry Wang, founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization, to examine the contest over influence, technology and the international order.

For much of the past century, Western powers played an outsized role in shaping that order. China’s growing economic, technological and diplomatic influence is challenging that balance.

This episode asks whether Western influence is in decline. Does China offer an alternative, or a different set of dependencies? And with tensions over Taiwan, the war in Ukraine and the race for artificial intelligence reshaping geopolitics, can competing visions of global order coexist?

Wang says we are “at a crossroads” as the global order shifts “from a unipolar world to a multipolar world.”

“Yet the multipolar system is not there. I think right now, the daunting task is that we have to get the major players to work together,” he says.

Hilton cautions against reducing the debate to a moral binary. “I do think that if we regard the world as one side good, the other side bad, we’re really not serving the conversation,” she says.

Bertrand argues that the differences between China and the West need not be irreconcilable. “We need to find a way to coexist and to accept each other as others,” he says.

Ávila looks beyond major powers, hoping to see “a different configuration of countries—a little like the Non-Aligned Movement did back in the days—that could have enough weight to tame the powerful.”

The new podcast season explores how cultural, social and political change shapes our identities, covering a range of topics including international law; the state of journalism, work and parenting; emerging technologies and the legacy of wars and empires.

“Will China or the West lead the world into the future?” is available across podcast platforms, YouTube and DohaDebates.com. New episodes follow weekly.