Sports mega-events and changing world order
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231163063 |
| Author | David R. Black |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00207020231163063
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Sports mega-events and
changing world order
David R. Black
Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
Abstract
Processes of making, sustaining, reforming, and un-making world orders are constants
in global politics and development. Understood in the neo-Gramscian tradition pio-
neered by Robert Cox, ideas, institutions, and material capabilities combine to shape
the range of possibilities for more and less stable orders. Sports mega-events (SMEs)—
most prominently, the Olympic Games—have played an underappreciated role in this
process. This paper examines the ways in which the Olympics manifested and sup-
ported the rise of globalized neoliberal hegemony in the early 1980s, the re-
configuration and erosion of this order through the 1990s and 2000s, and efforts to
fundamentally revise this order in the new millennium. Particular emphasis is placed on
the dual role of SMEs and the Olympics as manifestations of conspicuous consumption
and the pursuit of prestige on the one hand, and as focal points for sanctions campaigns
and boycotts on the other.
Keywords
Sports mega-events, olympics, world orders, hegemony, human rights, sanctions,
conspicuous consumption
Corresponding author:
David R. Black, Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University, Henry Hicks A & A Building, Halifax
NS B3H 4R2, Canada.
Email: david.black@dal.ca
2022, Vol. 77(4) 693–712
We live in a time when the fluidity and uncertainty of future world order(s) is a pressing
preoccupation. The relative decline of “the West”and what remains of the Pax
Americana; the rise of China and, more broadly, a growing range of “illiberal”actors
and forces; the tectonic shifts in the world economy wrought by the imperatives of
ecological sustainability and the sudden but sustained shock of the global COVID-19
pandemic; deeply destabilizing repercussions of technology-enabled and privatized
surveillance and intelligence capabilities;
1
and now the disorienting uncertainties
arising from Russia’s war on Ukraine—these and other profound changes suggest we
are moving towards a broad and deep realignment of the foundations of world (dis)
order.
The dynamic processes of making, sustaining, reforming, and un-making world
orders are, however, constants in global politics and development. While realist ac-
counts anchor these processes in the shifting configuration of state-based great power(s)
along with their allies and acolytes, the historicist and neo-Gramscian tradition
popularized by Robert Cox highlights the multi-dimensional nature of this process, in
which configurations of ideas, institutions, and material capabilities combine to shape
the range of possibilities for more and less hegemonic (i.e., relatively stable and
consensual) orders.
2
This process is not easy or rapid. Ordering structures change only
slowly and develop an array of vested interests and theoretical approaches that seek to
sustain them—what Cox famously characterized as “problem solving”as opposed to
“critical”theoretical approaches.
3
Identifying when and how such orders reach decisive
turning points, and what they turn towards is therefore an essential, though challenging,
analytical task, with important implications for praxis.
4
In this paper, I argue that an underappreciated role in this unfolding process has been
played by global elite sport, and in particular sports mega-events (SMEs). At the apex
of this complex of cultural, ideational, institutional, and material dynamics is the
modern Olympic Games, described by Susan Brownell as the “premier global ritual for
expressing global community.”
5
The Games are presided over by the powerfully
enigmatic International Olympic Committee (IOC).
6
Despite the plethora of authors
1. See Ronald J. Deibert, “Subversion Inc.: The age of private espionage,”Journal of Democracy 33, no. 2
(2022): 28–44.
2. SeeRobert Cox, “Social forces, states, and world orders: Beyond international relations theory,”inRobert
Cox with Timothy Sinclair, eds., Approachesto World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
85–123. It is important to note that even relatively stable hegemonic orders are never free from the shadow
of coercion and domination, particularly towards the margins of the system within and between countries.
3. Cox, “Social forces, states, and world orders,”87–91.
4. Milan Babic, “Let’stalk about the interregnum: Gramsci and the crisis of the liberal world order,”International
Affairs 96, no. 3 (2020): 767–786.
5. Susan Brownell, “Human rights and the Beijing Olympics: Imagined global community and the transnational
public sphere,”The British Journal of Sociology 63, no. 2 (2012): 306–327.
6. The “multiple personalities”of the contemporary IOC mean that it is at once akin to an international
diplomatic organization, a civil society-based social movement, and a multinational corporation. See
Byron Peacock, “A secret instinct of social preservation’: Legitimacy and the dynamic (re)constitution
of Olympic conceptions of the ‘good,’” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2011): 477–502.
694 International Journal 77(4)
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