“I think we are justified in our outrage against the racist and Orientalist undertones that characterize the criticism emanating from the West against Qatar lately,” Mira Al Hussein, an Emirati sociologist at Oxford University, told The Times. “But we cannot fault the fact,” she added, that Qatar and other Gulf States have drawn attention for their “lamentable human rights record.”
Qatar’s big bet
For all the financial and P.R. trouble, what is Qatar hoping to get in return? “Sportswashing” itself may be a new term, but governments have employed the strategy going back to the original Olympics, according to Paul Christesen, a professor of ancient Greek history at Dartmouth. “People take sports super seriously,” Christesen told Sports Illustrated in April. “And as soon as people do that, you can leverage it for geopolitical purposes.”
Hitler, for example, used the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to project a vision of Aryan supremacy while concealing the brutality of the Nazi regime from the rest of the world, to considerable success: A New York Times reporter wrote at the time that the games had put Germany “back in the fold of nations who have ‘arrived.’”
For Qatar, the desire to burnish its reputation may owe to its regional vulnerability. In 2017, Qatar’s neighbors — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates — and Egypt severed diplomatic ties and mounted a blockade against the country, accusing its government of supporting terrorism and becoming too friendly with Iran. The blockade ended only last year.
Qatar is “so small and so vulnerable, they can’t afford to antagonize anyone,” said Simon Chadwick, a professor of sport and geopolitical economy at Skema Business School in Paris. “One of the reasons they wanted to host the World Cup is to be seen as legitimate and trusted members of the international community.”
The spotlight on Qatar has had something of a unifying effect, as neighboring countries seek to benefit from spillover tourism and cheer on one another’s teams. “While Western media has complained about the event, Arab-language influencers, public relations managers, social media pages and media outlets have heaped praise on Qatar in a variety of ways,” writes Aziz Abu Sarah. “According to a popular narrative in the region, in these few weeks Qatar has transformed itself from a tiny Arab country to a regional power broker, and one willing to stand up to the West.”