Category: Politics
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Russia, Marseille, and the Geopolitics of Sport at Many Scales
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…
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A quick example of pernicious Russophobia
I’ve been attacked from all sides for making comments about contemporary Russia and Russian politics. I’ve been told that I’m in the pocket of Putin, or at the very least a naive “useful idiot”. Simultaneously, that same comment led others to tell me that I am Russophobic, a blind westerner who does not understand anything,…
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Unstable soft power – new article in print
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.…
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A Soviet interpretation on the quintessential American mega-event
This booklet is a rarity. Shipped all the way to Zurich from a legendary leftist bookstore in San Francisco (“fighting commodity fetishism with commodity fetishism since 1981”), this is a Soviet broadside against Reagan’s America, seen through the lens of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Back when I was living in Russia, a good friend once…
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The Promise and Pitfalls of the 2018 Football World Cup in Russia
Note: this was originally slated to be a commentary piece for a non peer-reviewed expert journal that shall remain nameless. For reasons I still don’t understand, the editor never wrote me back after commissioning and receiving the piece. I found it again recently during some computer cleanup, and given that it’s over a year past…
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L’esprit de l’escalier, or Meddling? What meddling?
In April this year I had the opportunity to give a talk at Smith College with Martin Müller and Chris Gaffney. The event was called Sport Mega Events and Urban Development: Cases of Brazil 2014, Rio 2016, Sochi 2014, Russia 2018, and it was hosted by Andrew Zimbalist. If you don’t know him, Andrew is a…