Abstract
This chapter divulges Qatar’s global sports strategy from an international relations perspective. It does so by first exploring why states seek to paint a positive image of themselves on the international stage, and how this can equate to the acquisition of (small state) power. This is achieved by focusing on the work of Joseph Nye, and his conceptualization of ‘soft power’. Following this, the chapter then turns to Qatar’s World Cup strategy, and sheds light on how the tournament seeks to acquire the state power regionally and globally, as well as how its broader investment in sport also seeks to help it achieve the objectives set out in its Qatar National Vision 2030, the blueprint for future development.
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Notes
- 1.
Referring to the two most global of sports events: the FIFA World Cup and the Summer Olympic Games; this is in contrast to ‘second-order’ events, denoting those smaller and, in many cases, more-regional sports events—such as a Winter Olympic Games, European Championships and Asian Games
- 2.
In 2011, the Pew Research Centre conducted 15,000 interviews across 15 countries, and found over half non-Muslims living in the United States and Western Europe held the general stereotype of Arab communities as predominantly ‘fanatical’ and/or ‘violent’.
- 3.
Important to note is that, more generally, supposed tourism gains from sports event hosting can be drastically overstated: the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea, for example, proved to be wildly optimistic, with Japan attracting only 30,000 more visitors than the year before the Games, and South Korea reporting the same number as the previous year (see: Horne & Manzenreiter, 2004).
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Brannagan, P.M., Reiche, D. (2022). The Politics and Power of Small States: The 2022 World Cup and Qatar’s Global Sports Strategy. In: Qatar and the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96822-9_3
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