"debate has unfolded" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to an ongoing discussion or argument among people. For example, "As the Supreme Court case continued, an intense debate has unfolded around the issue of gun control."
An unusually public debate has unfolded in think-tanks, on microblogs and in state media about how China should improve the way it handles urbanisation.
Michael Jacobs, former special adviser on climate to Gordon Brown, and a figure central to the way the climate debate has unfolded in the UK, says: "I don't think it [the release of the emails] had an impact on Copenhagen.
This Obama has disappeared in the past few weeks while the health care debate has unfolded.
A debate has unfolded in the literature over whether other animals, like humans, are capable of thinking about past and future events.
The debate has unfolded in other parts of the country as well.
At the same time, though, as Mr. Chomsky acknowledges in the film, a searching and wide-ranging debate has unfolded about America's response to terrorism and, more broadly, about the history and future of its role in the world.
It is focussed almost entirely on the male experience, although similar debates have unfolded over the seeming decline of butch style in lesbian culture.
The debate in the House has unfolded along familiar lines this week, with well-rehearsed arguments about the science of global warming and the effects of new environmental regulations on domestic energy prices and jobs.
In the debate about prostitution that has unfolded on this blog and elsewhere, one of the thorniest issues has been those women who are not obviously coerced and participate in the high-priced call girl services.
To this end, responding to several strands of the debate on assemblage urbanism that has unfolded in previous issues of City, here we clarify our meta-theoretical stance, address several methodological questions and reiterate our arguments regarding the importance of a reinvigorated geopolitical economy of planetary urbanization.
As the debate over military action in Syria has unfolded in the West, Iraq's own painful history with American military intervention, and the false intelligence put forward to justify it, has provided a counternarrative to those who support intervention.
