This was a highlight of my year. I’ve long admired the work on soft power and mega-events by Jonathan Grix and friends, and I had some ideas on soft power myself. But I intended these ideas as a refinement of the notion of soft power, not as a criticism per se of Grix et al. I wanted to suggest that there were a few ways that we could augment our traditional understandings of soft power in order to account for some of the things I saw in the development of the 2018 Men’s Football World Cup in Russia. So it was a particular joy to write this piece on soft power and send it to its native neighborhood, as it were.

There are writing projects that, for me, feel Sisyphean. Every sentence, every word is like pulling raw ore from the unyielding earth. This wasn’t one of them. This time around, the paper flowed like pure water from a spring. More like that, please.

Please read it here, if you have institutional access.

I am hopeful that my next grant will sponsor Open Access for articles. In the meantime, if you’re locked out by the paywall, you can also read a postprint on my institution’s repository, here.