Once again the anglophone World Universities Debating Championship (WUDC) took place during the turn of the year. This year's location was Mexico City. The tournament started the 27.12.17 and ended the 04.01.18. After nine preliminary rounds the teams breaking to the outrounds were announced on New Year's Eve. At the WUDC, teams participate classified as one of three language categories: EPL (English as a Proficient Language), ESL (English as a Second Language) and EFL (English as a Foreign Language). EPL-classified teams can only participate in the Open Break, ESL-teams depending on their ranking either in the Open Break oder the ...

In March 2008, I sat with a few friends at the University of Porto, Faculty of Law, and we decided to create “the debate society”. That made some sense at the time since we felt like we were completely alone: there was no other debate society in Portugal, international tournaments sounded like something completely out of reach, and we didn’t know any other debaters. Many didn’t even know what debate was: professors and students were afraid we would be a façade for some political party and the idea that debate could have a place outside partisan politics sounded weird to ...