To the Fall 2017 Edition

At the start of 2017, it was the pleasure of the Editors to send out the call for papers for what we think is a valuable new platform to talk about all things to do with debates, and about debaters. The call for papers stated:

‘International Debate is a new practitioner’s journal for members of the international debating community. We publish both opinion pieces and scholarly articles, on issues of relevance to debaters, coaches, and judges at the schools and university levels. We are particularly interested in the relationship between competitive debating and wider society, especially in so far as they relate to civic education and public culture. We welcome submissions from members of all debating communities, regardless of the format they debate in. Scholarly articles may be from any discipline or may be multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary in nature. We encourage all contributors.’

We were delighted with the response that we had. Some contributors were eager to begin writing immediately; others offered to write in the future; many others were keen to suggest avenues that we could explore; all were enthused to be part of a community that vigorously invests in scholarly writing as a complement to the vigorous speech-making that is part and parcel of debating. This inaugural edition is a humble start to encouraging robust scholarship about global debating.

We thank everyone for their patience and trust and we are delighted to launch this first e-edition of International Debate.

To the 2019-2020 Edition

In the fall of 2017, we launched the International Debate Magazine as a platform to collect and curate various perspectives about our global debating community from practitioners and participants around the world. We were pleased with the response we received, and happy to see that many found value in the articles submitted to that edition.

In 2019, we relaunched the platform with a slightly different take. We were privileged to present an academic paper by Christopher Doak and R. Eric Barnes, who have conducted an in-depth and rigorous analysis of the reliability of debate adjudicators at various levels (a subject which many of us have thought about but have never had conclusive answers).

This year, we are pleased to publish two more papers by R. Eric Barnes, Paul Kehle, Hugh N. McKenny and Chuan-Zheng Lee, the first of which centres around the accuracy of different systems by which tournaments can decide to break teams, and the second of which surrounds the fairness of these scoring systems. We hope that readers will find them both insightful and comprehensive.

Apart from that, this edition presents articles written by young school debaters from various countries, in which the authors reflect on the value of debate to them personally, as well as the debate scenes in their countries. We are confident that this unique perspective remains equally valuable to all, and welcome feedback on our new approach.

Our first three team articles are by the World Schools teams from India, Rwanda and Singapore.

We value all contributions from individuals and teams who are involved in debate. If you would like to submit an article for publication, please email teamsingaporedebate@gmail.com with your submission.

Acknowledgements

The Editors would like to thank all contributors to this issue of International Debate. We would like to extend appreciation to Benjamin Mak for his mentorship of our Editors and Writers. We extend thanks to RedDot. academy, Singapore for supporting this endeavour.