Doha Debates Town Hall: The future of national identity and the nation state

David Engels was Professor and Chair of Roman History at the University of Brussels (ULB) and currently works as free writer and lecturer for world history at the ICES University in France. He is the author and editor of numerous scholarly books and papers on ancient history, the philosophy of history and modern conservatism. He is chiefly known through his study Le déclin, where he compared the current crisis of the West to the decline and fall of the Roman Republic in the 1st c. B.C., and through his books Renovatio Europae, Que faire? and Défendre l’Europe, all available in numerous translations. Engels has also published a thousand articles on culture and politics in the broader European media, comprising a cooking column with his prefered recipes.

Shashi Tharoor is a politician and award-winning author of 26 books of fiction and non-fiction. With a three-decade long career at the United Nations, he has served as a peacekeeper, refugee worker, and administrator at the highest levels, serving as Under-Secretary General during Kofi Annan’s leadership. Some of his popular books include Why I Am A Hindu, Inglorious Empire, and more recently Ambedkar: A Life.

Wael B. Hallaq is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he has been teaching ethics, law, and intellectual history since 2009.
He has written more than eighty scholarly articles and over a dozen books, treating logic, legal history, the modern state, and moral philosophy, within an overarching intellectual project concerned with the critique of modernity. Hallaq’s work has won many distinguished awards and is widely debated around the world, with books, dissertations, and articles devoted to the study and analysis of his writings. His life and work have been featured in many symposia, talk shows, and documentaries by major media outlets. Most of his books and articles have been translated into multiple languages, including French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic, Albanian, Turkish, Kurdish, Persian, Urdu, Russian, and Bengali.

Malika Bilal is an award-winning international journalist who splits her time between Los Angeles, CA and Washington, DC. She hosts The Take, Al Jazeera English’s flagship daily news vodcast, where her intimate interviews with newsmakers around the world have twice earned her the Gracie Award for Best Podcast News Host. Prior to The Take, she spent eight years co-hosting the Emmy-nominated TV news talk show, The Stream, broadcast to more than 310 million households in more than 140 countries. A Chicago native, Malika studied at the American University in Cairo and graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She previously worked for Voice of America, has written for the Chicago Tribune, NPR and ESPN, and has hosted documentaries for PBS Digital and Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines. Malika’s reporting has taken her across the US and the Middle East, and she’s interviewed guests spanning the political and entertainment spectrum: from the late President Jimmy Carter and the Dalai Lama, to Lupita Nyong’o and Trevor Noah. Her favorite interviews, though, are with the people you haven’t heard of yet.