How “Soft” is the Power of Sport?


The year 2022 has been a busy one at the intersection of sport and geopolitics. Qatar is only the latest nation to brand itself and exert its “soft power” by leveraging sport, with the forthcoming FIFA Men’s World Cup. We saw China do it earlier in the year with a Winter Olympics, and Saudi Arabia with a new golf league, while Russia lost its sporting soft power to the sanctions that followed its invasion of Ukraine. But this is not a new phenomenon; global sport has always been enmeshed in political messaging and international power politics. Join New America’s National Fellows Program and the Convergence Lab at Arizona State University to explore how nations leverage sport to advance political agendas, and how we fans, as sport’s “consumers,” should think about these efforts and react to them.

Speakers:

Anne-Marie Slaughter
CEO, New America

Franklin Foer
Staff Writer, The Atlantic
Author, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
Former National Fellow, New America

Lise Klaveness
President, Norwegian Football Association

Michael Page
Deputy Director, Middle East and North Africa Division
Human Rights Watch

León Krauze
Columnist, Washington Post
National News Anchor, Univision

Moderator:

Andrés Martinez
Editorial Director, Future Tense
Professor of Practice, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, ASU

Scott Brooks
Director, Global Sport Institute, ASU

Date:
November 02, 2022
Run time:
1:13:44
Location:
Online
Presented by:
ASU's Convergence Lab and New America