DOHA: The 9th Al Jazeera Forum has launched the first research competition in which young writers under the age of thirty five years from within the Arab world and beyond are participating on the topic of “Conflict and Change in the Arab World”. The competition aims to open the door to allow this age group to express its visions and ideas about issues of change and conflict in the Arab region.
A large number of young people from the Arab world have responded to the competition, and the panel specifically set up to judge the competition has received a large number of papers: two hundred and four research papers in both Arabic and English have been selected for judging. The young contestants are from a range of different countries, such as Morocco, Sudan, Jordan, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria, Palestine, Mauritania, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon, Russia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey and the US.
The academic competition has been widely followed on social media with 117,024 users on its Facebook page and 3,676 users following the competition on Twitter.
The participating papers will be judged by a panel made up of individuals from outside the Al Jazeera Media Network before the results are announced between 25 and 30 April 2015. The panel will report its nominations of the best five research papers to allow their authors to be special guests at the 9th Al Jazeera Forum to be held 4-6 May 2015.
