Note: this is the second time (!) something like this has happened. As before, I was approached to write a commentary for a non peer-reviewed expert journal – a different one this time. As before, and I still have no idea why, the editor never wrote back after commissioning and receiving the piece. Did I write to check in? Of course. Has there been any response? Not the slightest. Rather bad form. I don’t let it ruin my day, but it’s disappointing all the same. And as before, since it didn’t come out as planned, I’ll share the draft here. I’m in the process of developing a course around these topics, and this paper was a useful part of that, so not all is lost.

Russia, Marseille, and the Geopolitics of Sport at Many Scales

Sven Daniel Wolfe, University of Lausanne

There is a tendency in geopolitics to restrict discussion to the level of the national state and the frames of international relations. In this light, the shorthand of synecdoche is a common tool, so phrases like “Russia seeks” or “Washington denies” are typical when discussing matters at the global scale. In the geopolitics of sport, this often translates into an examination of why certain countries aspire to host global mega-events like the Olympics or the Football World Cup, and much ink has been dedicated to interpreting the goals of a given country in hosting. In this light, it is no surprise that “What Russia wants” was a phrase commonly heard in the run-up to Russia hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2018 World Cup. While convenient, this shorthand reduces complexity and renders invisible a multitude of nuanced and sometimes contradictory or even paradoxical realities. Here, this intervention argues that it can be a dangerous mistake to oversimplify geopolitical debate through restricting analysis to the national and international scales. By examining the urban violence surrounding the 2016 European Football Championship match between Russia and England in Marseille, France, this intervention considers the dangers of conceptual reductionism and offers some potential approaches to addressing these oversights within the geopolitics of sport.

The literature on urban geopolitics provides fertile ground to start moving away from the abstractions of global scales. Inherently transdisciplinary and situated at the intersection of political geography, urban studies, and architecture, the origins of this work stem from the investigation of the urban spatialities of organized political violence. In other words, people working with urban geopolitics look at the city not merely as a container for war, nor even as a target for violence, but rather as an integral part of the war experience itself. The key mechanism for understanding urban geopolitics is what Stephen Graham calls a “telescoping connection” that allows observers to make links between transnational geopolitical scales and local violence. This move – from global to local and back again – suggests that neither scale can be properly understood without the other, even as it still understands the scales as discrete.

Moving the register away from war and back towards sport, it becomes clear that a telescoping move between scales brings nuance and complexity to the discussion. An example that blends geopolitics with local urban violence is the infamous Russian – English hooligan brawls in the streets of Marseille during the 2016 European Football Championship. Some of the English press noted the savagery, strategy, and military-style organization of the Russian fighting, and framed their fans as innocent victims of coordinated Russian aggression. Conversely, some of the Russian press depicted the events as overblown, and suggested that the terrifying scenes described in western media were inaccurately pinned on Russia due to persistent Russophobia. Videos posted to YouTube document the violence and show English and Russian hooligans hurling bottles and chairs and trading blows. Other videos show Russian men marching in the streets of Marseille, bellowing a patriotic song from the Second World War, before cutting to scenes of street brawls and police efforts to restore order. The choice of this Russian military song is deeply symbolic, evoking historic sacrifice, loss, and triumph against foreign adversaries. So, despite official Russian government disavowal of the events (as well as a concerted effort to present the violence as coming from fans of many nations), there was still a sense of pride among some Russian fans that “our boys” had shown courage and strength, and had beaten the famous British hooligans at their own game.

It is clear that there was more going on in Marseille than a football brawl, however, and this petty urban violence cannot be separated from political developments at larger scales. The fights occurred in the larger context of the chilled international relations that followed president Putin’s increasingly authoritarian domestic politics and the war in Ukraine, and prefigured Russian influence in Brexit and the American elections, and the novichok poisonings in Salisbury. Shifting between scales reveals how the fighting in Marseille – rife with military symbolism but inextricably linked to the football championship – is part of the hardening in geopolitical relations that some have called a new cold war. The stage for these conflicts between Russia and the broader west is not what would be understood as a traditional battlefield. Instead, it takes place in football stadiums and city streets, as well as in individual bodies.

Examining geopolitics at even smaller scales than the city or the street requires a further step. The literature on intimate geopolitics provides conceptual tools to make sense of global events through micro moments in the home and the body, unpacking seemingly small moments that resonate across different scales. Crucially, within this work, the focus on fleeting moments, tensions, and situatedness is not framed as separate from the global. Instead, the individual and the geopolitical are understood to be co-constructed and relational, an argument that throws into question a number of established ways of thinking about scale and hierarchy. Moving back into the domain of sport, then, borrowing the vocabulary of intimate geopolitics allows for a more nuanced interpretation of why sport is so politically powerful. In this framework, Elizabeth Militz draws a line between emotion, affect, and belonging as felt in the body, the action of waving flags in a football stadium, and the wider processes of nationalism and nation building. She does so in order to better understand the ways in which the notion of the nation is built and reinforced, moving beyond a superficial discussion of national identity. Following Militz and other scholars of the geopolitical intimate, an appreciation of smaller moments can bring fuller understanding to global scales. For instance, it can shed light on the actual mechanisms by which hosting a global sporting mega-event like the Olympics can reframe conceptions of the nation and, going deeper, it can also trouble notions of the nation itself.

From this perspective, the violence in Marseille can be understood by reference to fear, elation, adrenaline, camaraderie, victory, and loss. Coursing through the bodies of the brawlers just as they themselves were tearing through the city streets, these emotions and affects connect abstract notions like “Russia” into something immediately and viscerally knowable. The young men who sang war songs and dominated old town Marseille did not reflect their nation. Rather, in these actions they created their nation, and that they did so on an international stage made the display all the more potent. To be sure, there were numerous other competing narratives at play, and it is inaccurate to ignore the Russian fans who were aghast at the behavior of their countrymen, to say nothing of those millions of Russians who care nothing about football and were occupied by other concerns on that day. Still, the violence was a significant and undeniable occurrence, and as such there were important moments at a variety of scales to be teased out. There are notions of nationhood, of geopolitical conflict, of war-by-other-means, of the pervasiveness of right-wing politics and the increasing dangers of authoritarian practice. There are also notions of tribalism, of belonging, of maleness and struggle and conquest. It was a brawl between football hooligans in a European city and, at the same time, a snapshot of post-Soviet Russia in relation to its neighbors: strong, assertive, violent, effective, messy, contradictory and, ultimately, self-isolating.

In the end, a multiscalar approach to the geopolitics of sport is not an attempt to advocate for preferential treatment of one scale over another, just as the example of the Russian – English brawls in Marseille is not intended to demonize or valorize one group or another. On the contrary, this is an argument for a cumulative approach towards geopolitical analysis, bringing in a multiplicity of perspectives in order to unearth nuance and complexity that might otherwise be missed. The geopolitics of sport without an appreciation of the local and the individual is just as incomplete as it would be without the national and the global.