Qatar World Cup sparks global coverage of Christian Gläßel’s research on sports and authoritarianism

In the wake of growing concerns about Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, media outlets across the world have shone a spotlight on Qatar’s human rights record and explored the implications of an authoritarian country hosting this event. To guide the discussion on this thorny topic, Gläßel’s paper "International Sports Events, Media Attention, and Autocratic Repression: Evidence from the 1978 FIFA World Cup", published last October in the American Political Science Review, could not be more timely.

Within Germany, the research insights by Gläßel and his co-authors have been covered in interviews and media pieces by Der Spiegel, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, Deutschlandfunk Nova, Evangelischer Pressedienst epd, rbb24 Inforadio, and in an upcoming episode of Eine Stunde History. Globally, the story has also been picked up by high-profile newspapers in the United Kingdom (The Economist, Metro, and The Times), Switzerland (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), Israel (Haaretz), Denmark (Politiken, Journalisten), Canada (La Presse), Italy (Will Media), and Sri Lanka (Sri Lankan Guardian).

By diving into the Argentinian military junta’s well-documented repression during the period of the 1978 FIFA World Cup, the research paper demonstrated how an authoritarian host state strategically times repression and human rights abuses to “minimize the risk of both international pillorying and domestic dissent”, clearly showing the devastating consequences that international sports events in authoritarian regimes have for democracy and opposition activists. Despite these dangers, Gläßel and his co-authors show that the frequency of autocracy-hosted international sports events continues to increase. 

Read the research paper here.

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