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| My photo at a Qatar Stars League double header in March 2016: Empty stands tell the tale of native public interest in football. However, Prof. Susan Dun reported that populous foreign laborers do pack matches for the leagues they follow: another piece of the untold story in Qatar. |
I was just in Oxford, UK, for “Sport 5.” (The full name of the conference, sponsored by Inter-Disciplinary.Net, is in the previous post about my contribution there.) I tweeted some of the highlights of Sport 5 (link to Twitter from the ribbon atop this page, Sept. 13-15, 2016). I want to share a bit more about one paper at Sport 5 that stood out for its unconventional thesis. The paper came from this year’s conference coordinator, Professor Susan Dun, a communication scholar at Northwestern University in Qatar.
I don’t want to steal Dun’s thunder or evidence, so I’ll give
only cursory treatment to her thesis and outline three rationales that I found
persuasive. My own impressions have
mixed with recollection, so blame me for any misstatements.
In essence, Dun posited that however much Qatar deserves
condemnation for corrupt dealings with FIFA (see generally Blake & Calvert’s The Ugly Game), the ills of
the kafala labor system, or dreams of
air-conditioned desert stadiums, the regime is not getting a fully fair shake
in global perception. She made a compelling
case, and activists, journalists, and scholars investigating the social and
economic implications of the upcoming World Cups in Russia 2018 and Qatar
2022—myself included—should take note.
First, Dun placed the Qatari bid for 2022 in the context of
Qatar’s ambitious struggle for political legitimacy through soft-power
sport. In its rush onto the world stage,
Qatar was not ready for intense scrutiny and scathing criticism that
accompanied the award (and then was amplified by the FIFA corruption fiasco, pointed
out David Storey of the University of Worcester, who, by the way, presented a fascinating paper on the GAA). Within Qatar, criticism of Al Thani leadership
is not just legally problematic, but socially taboo. So Qataris were utterly ill equipped to
respond to an external public relations crisis in a way that would have seemed
natural to Western observers—with press conferences, collaborative inquiries,
and affirmative information dissemination.
Instead Qatar took an outmoded defend-or-deny stance, which only
bloodied the waters.
Second, Dun explained that Qatar actually implemented a
great many reforms to redress exposed deficiencies, for example, illegalizing
passport retention and improving living conditions for foreign laborers. The communications failure has meant that reform
stories have not gotten much play. Meanwhile,
reform has been slowed by understandable challenges. Employers might still seize passports. Wrangling the middlemen is a laborious
process in part because rapidly developed Qatar lacks regulatory and
enforcement mechanisms that Westerners take for granted in key areas, such as workplace
safety and banking. Communications
failure again means that these impediments are not explained. Reform is necessarily incremental, but
unresolved problems on the ground are misconstrued to signal government
indifference, if not malice.
Third, Dun documented a media affection for criticism of
Qatar. In part the penchant seems driven
by ignorance. Journalists, bloggers, et al., tend not to be familiar with
Qatar, so are more likely to republish judgmental commentary without critical
analysis for fairness and accuracy. I
suspect that hostility toward a wealthy Islamic state in the post-9/11 era also
plays a role. Again, communications
failure exaggerates the problem. Dun
gave evidence that even Russia is more likely than Qatar to get a fair shake in
media coverage. I can attest that in my
own research, I only recently read about changes in Russian labor
law—allegations not unlike those that have plagued Qatar for years—to hasten
World Cup infrastructure development at the expense of worker rights. (See
Martin
Müller, How Mega-Events Capture Their
Hosts: Event Seizure and the World Cup 2018 in Russia, Urban Geography,
2015, doi).
Dun got push-back in discussion with Sport 5 attendees, but
she held firm. To be clear, Dun makes no motion
whatever to justify human rights abuses; quite the contrary.
She simply laments that the whole story of Qatar's reform is not being told. It would be a mistake to pull the World Cup from Qatar, she says, because there are desirable reforms occurring that should not be undermined. (This is happily consistent with Benavides and my extension in World Cup Dreaming of Jeremiah Ho's incrementalist theory). She makes that case well enough that those of
us who fancy ourselves objective observers should pay attention.
