This open access book explores the linkages between geopolitics and hosting mega-events. It encompasses and transcends the international and domestic dimensions of soft power to unpack how mega-events shape cities and societies through notions of unity and greatness, but also investigates local developments beneath the Potemkin surface of the global spectacle. Drawing on a global range of case studies from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, North America, South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, this volume features the sensitivity of grounded local research framed within geopolitical perspectives. Together, they present an international and transdisciplinary understanding of the local and global political implications of hosting mega-events. The volume reveals what hides under the mega-event spectacle: problems that regardless of national context most often occur to the detriment of host populations.
This is an open access book.
1. Introduction: Rationales and foundational concepts - Sven Daniel
Wolfe.-
2. Geopolitics and international sporting events in the United
Kingdom: Constitutional navel-gazing and the politics of event hosting -
Stuart Whigham.-
3. When the stage came down: A short-term feel-good
experience at South Africas World Cup - Rutendo Musikavanhu.-
4. Behind the
golden glow: The soft power, Potemkinism, and protest of Australian
mega-events - Max Holleran, Jennifer Minner, and Martin Abbott.-
5. Stepping
out of the shadows: The role of pivotal individuals in Qatars aspirations to
host mega-events - Tobias Zumbraegel and Sebastian Sons.-
6. From being
there is everything to go big or go home? Comparing the opening ceremonies
of the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing - Julia
Gurol.-
7. The authoritarian legacy: Mega-event security, the
managerial-militarized model, and the rise of the far-right in Brazil - Bruno
Cardoso and Dennis Pauschinger.-
8. The Eastern European mega-event decade:
Sports, geopolitics, and war at the start of the 21st century - Vitaly
Kazakov and Dmitrijs Andrejevs.-
9. The Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics:
Soft power, sportswashing, and the invasion of Iraq - Jules Boykoff and Reed
McFeely.-
10. Conclusion: After the spotlight - Sven Daniel Wolfe.
Sven Daniel Wolfe is a political and urban geographer. He is Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione fellow in the Spatial Planning and Urban Policy group at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He works on the planning and impacts of mega-events, with a specific focus on urban sustainable development and everyday geopolitics. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on mega-events, as well as the monograph More Than Sport (2021, LIT Verlag). He has lectured widely on the problems and potentials of mega-events, to audiences ranging from academics to members of local and national governments, in numerous countries including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
