On Thursday 16 March 2023, the ACRPS Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Unit convened its symposium, “The Discourse on the Qatar 2022 World Cup: Power, Politics, and Aspiration”. The meeting addressed the discursive dimension of the Qatar World Cup in November-December 2022, which was not simply a championship for the largest sporting event in the world, but also one that elicited intense debates. Across the first day’s four panels and nine papers, leading experts presented their research on the topic.
The symposium was inaugurated with opening remarks by researcher Abdulrahman Albaker, who addressed the Arab Center’s attempt to keep up with the cultural debates invoked by the Qatar World Cup, which represented a fascinating vehicle for the flow of symbols, values, and meanings. In an attempt to understand why a small state sought to host the World Cup, Albaker explained that the main framework through which the event was dealt with is based on two conceptualizations, "soft power" and "national branding". The actual organization of the tournament, however, far exceeded these two frameworks, according to Albaker. In this way, the symposium sought to delve into the issues re-introduced by the event: identity, North-South relations, Western centrism and how to confront it, the post-colonial world, multiculturalism, cultural relativism, globalization, “universal culture", neo-orientalism, and so on.
The first panel, “2022 Qatar World Cup and Questions of Cultural Relativism”, was moderated by Reem Al-Ansari, Law Professor at Qatar University, and included two presentations. Hans Hognestad, Professor of Sociology of Sport at University of South-Eastern Norway, opened the panel with “Qatar 2022: Fan Ontologies, Soft Power, and Questions of Cultural Relativism”, a paper co-authored with Richard Giulianotti, Professor of Sociology at Loughborough University. The presenters explored some of the main political and cultural discourses and debates surrounding Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup finals, identifying the key issue as related to "fake" and wider transnational fandom at the event, and the potential emergence of new "fan ontologies". Hognestad and Giulianotti discussed these issues with reference to theories of (neo-)Orientalism, cultural relativism, and constructivism in international relations, drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Qatar and elsewhere.
Next, Joel Rookwood, Lecturer in Sport Management at University College Dublin, presented his paper “Building Soft Power and Avoiding Soft Disempowerment Through Football Mega-Events: Addressing Multiculturalism and Global Culture in Qatar”, through which he demonstrated the ways in which Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup was framed as an attempt to influence international audiences and build soft power. He further conceptualized criticisms towards host nations as a form of soft disempowerment and examined how lessons learned from hosting previous competitions affected the staging of the 2022 World Cup, presenting the results of the interviews he conducted with international fans and tournament volunteers at each event.
The second panel, “2022 Qatar World Cup in the Critical Discourse”, moderated by ACRPS Researcher Aicha Elbasri, began with Marc Owen Jones, Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University, and his paper “Reductionism and Orientalism: Ten Years of Media Representation of Qatar's World Cup in the British Press”. Jones analysed newspaper headlines mentioning Qatar and Russia since 2010 to create a typology of themes and agenda-setting related to Qatar 2022. He attempted to determine how the event has been “framed” through the UK media, asserting that Russia, while attracting negative coverage, did not receive the same degree of criticism as did Qatar. These differences were explained through concepts of news values, Orientalism, and small state politics.
Then, Mohammed El-Fatih Hamdi, Assistant Professor at Qatar University, and Hichem Akoubache, Professor at the Department of Mass Communication at Qatar University, referred in their paper “The Campaign against the Qatar World Cup: An Analysis of the French Media Discourse” to the campaign launched by some French media outlets against Qatar due to its hosting of the 2022 World Cup, and how this campaign focused on specific issues. They illustrated French media rhetoric surrounding the event while identifying the motives behind such propagandistic and hostile discourse against Qatar, seeking to understand why the French media spread doubts about Qatar’s ability to organize this international spectacle.
Maryam Al-Kuwari, Assistant Professor of International Relations at Qatar University’s International Affairs Department, moderated the third panel “2022 Qatar World Cup from Various Positionalities” which included three speakers. The first was Laurent Bonnefoy, Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who explored in the paper “Qatar 2022: Competing Narratives in Europe and in the Arab World” the antagonistic debates and narratives in the media and among decision makers before and after the 2022 World Cup. Bonnefoy analysed how these debates cannot be understood merely as opposition between the North and South and stressed a number of internal fault-lines linked to multiculturalism, Islam, and gender.
Abdulrahman Helali, Associate Professor at the Quran and Sunnah Program of Qatar University’s College of Sharia and Islamic Studies, sought in his paper “Qatar 2022 in Religious Discourse” to trace and analyse the religious discourse that accompanied the World Cup, which some used as an opportunity for proselytization and advocacy. Others hailed Qatar’s organizational success as an example of Islamist victories that can be rebranded in populist wrapping. He also presented alternative voices that rejected this religious instrumentalization and the reasons for this rejection.
In her paper “Qatar 2022 from the Perspective of Arab Digital Networkers”, Bouchra Zagagh, Professor of Pedagogical Sociology at the Centre Régional des Métiers de l’Education et de la Formation, used the netnography method to examine how Arab digital networkers interacted with the Qatar World Cup and the accompanying forms of the art of presence, whether in the digital space, on-site (at the stadiums), or the hybrid independent space. Zagagh asserted that the events of the World Cup, by merging with digital networks and practices of the collective self, transformed the championship from a traditional global event ruled by fixed relationships into an online celebration presenting a different narrative on the Arab self and its humanitarian and religious values.
In the fourth and final panel “2022 Qatar World Cup and International Relations Revisited”, moderated by Aisha Al-Ammari, Assistant Professor of Law at the Qatar University College of Law, Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at Skema Business School, showed how the 2022 FIFA World Cup epitomized the emergence of a new paradigm, sport as geopolitical economy, in his paper “Discourse on the Qatar World Cup: Sport's New Geopolitical Economy”. Chadwick argued that Qatar sought to project soft power and engage in diplomacy through its hosting of the competition, while observers in the Global North instead framed Qatari policy and strategy as nothing more than sportswashing.
Concluding the panel, Jan Busse, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Political Science of the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, in his paper “Regional Power Play: Shifting Political Dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa in the Context of Qatar's World Cup”, departed from the premise that football and politics are inevitably interrelated, arguing that the Qatar World Cup is closely linked to multiple regional political dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Accordingly, based on a practical-theoretical understanding of diplomacy which has gained prominence within International Relations, he addressed the intricacies of regional power politics and how they played out in the context of the world cup.
