Events

As part of the School of Arts and Humanities' History and Heritage Research seminar programme, Jonathan Grix, University of Birmingham, presents his seminar: Leveraging Sports Mega-Events for International Prestige: from Berlin to Beijing and Rio.

This talk offers a way of understanding how states use sports mega-events for political means (usually the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, but also 'second order' events such as the Commonwealth Games). By unpicking the reasons offered by governments of various political hues and the academic literature on sport mega-events more broadly, the positive and 'manufactured consent' around the 'legacies' of such events is problematised. Further, Joseph Nye's concept of 'soft power' is introduced as it offers a prism through which to read the reasons why advanced democratic states, dictatorships, authoritarian regimes and 'emerging states' alike compete with one another to stage sports 'megas'. Recent empirical work on Germany's hosting of the 2006 FIFA World Cup will be presented to indicate the trend towards using these events as a means of increasing a nation's international prestige and to improve their image abroad.

All welcome.