Sports and state repression: Christian Gläßel and co-authors unearth violent pattern surrounding 1978 FIFA World Cup

In 2022, both the Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup are hosted by authoritarian regimes (China and Qatar), part of a growing pattern which urgently brings into question how hosting these international sports events interacts with repression and violence against political dissidents. Hertie School postdoctoral researcher Christian Gläßel, along with co-authors Adam Scharpf (University of Copenhagen, GIGA) and Pearce Edwards (Carnegie Mellon), sets out to investigate this linkage in the new paper ‘International Sports Events, Media Attention, and Autocratic Repression: Evidence from the 1978 FIFA World Cup’.

This paper is the “first systematic investigation of the impact of international mega-events on the local dynamics of state repression”. It focuses on patterns of repression and violence by the Argentinian military junta before, during, and after the 1978 FIFA World Cup, a case which is unusually well-documented thanks to the efforts of the post-dictatorship truth commission. Remarkably, the authors find substantial evidence that the use of force escalated in host cities prior to the World Cup and immediately following the World Cup. During the event, the use of force decreased sharply, was softened, and mostly took place during journalists’ working hours (i.e., World Cup matches), an effect most noticeable in the immediate vicinity of journalists’ hotels.

As Gläßel and his co-authors explain, hosting international sports events presents both a huge opportunity and a substantial risk to authoritarian regimes. These events attract a peerless global audience; for example, almost 50% of the world’s population watched the 2016 Summer Olympics. Such an audience gives authoritarian regimes an enormous global platform to combat negative perceptions and show a rosier picture of the state of the country. On the other hand, these events come along with a raft of curious foreign journalists who can do substantial damage to a regime’s image if any evidence of wrongdoing emerges.

Gläßel and co-authors term this the ‘scrutiny-publicity dilemma’, and their paper offers critical insights into how authoritarian regimes navigate this dilemma by strategically dialling repression up or down to “minimize the risk of both international pillorying and domestic dissent”. The results of the study clearly reject the whitewashing rhetoric of sports functionaries, sponsors, and autocrats, and show that major sporting events in dictatorships have devastating consequences for democracy and opposition activists. In addition to contributing to a variety of research streams, these findings can also help human rights organizations and activists identify where and when repression around sports events is likely to occur. As global coverage of international sports competitions continues to increase, this research contributes to sounding the alarm about the potential for these events to become a mouthpiece for authoritarian regimes and a vessel for repression and violence against dissidents.

Read the full article here.

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