Mega-events, media, and the integrated world of global spectacle

This chapter explores the interplay between World Cup ambitions, the continued growth of the high-security state and issues of colonial and racial difference, drawing examples from the recent World Cup in Brazil, the South African World Cup in 2010, and future World Cups in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. "Racism", or "neo-colonialism", or "neo-liberalism", a concept that has however ideological purchase the term still possesses simultaneously becomes synonymous with "neo-colonialism" and is a euphemism for the term. The history of South Africa converted the 2010 World Cup into effective prophylactic against race. South Africa sought the World Cup for reasons of global recognition and economic ambition. It marked FIFA's first turn to the decolonized black world. The Sochi 2014 "pacification" program was aimed, simultaneously, at two kinds of nationals: those identifiable within the Russian Federation, who made their opposition visible as Russian citizens, and those who operated under conditions of greater stealth.