Securing the Spectacle: Public Safety and the Qatar World Cup 

• In Event: Urban Politics in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Political science has recently seen an explosion of interest in policing. Yet police departments the world over are only one institution in a broader array of civilian organizations situated within the realm of “public safety.” This realm includes public agencies dedicated, for example, to pre-hospital emergency medicine, fire suppression, licensing, permitting, and surveillance. Often treated in scholarly research as more technocratic and less overtly political than, for example, police or military organizations, political science has left these actors’ role in maintaining a security state relatively underexamined. This paper argues that deploy public safety organizations in ways that profoundly shape power relations and political behavior.  

Building on three months of immersive field research in Doha, Qatar in the lead-up to and during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, this paper uses Qatar as a site to explore how states define, perceive, and seek to manage public safety threats. The site of the 2022 World Cup—the first to be held in an Arab or Muslim country—provides an incomparable opportunity to study how conceptions of public safety evolve in real time in an authoritarian state. Sporting events and mass spectacles prompt states to develop and participants to submit to policies that include mass surveillance, crowd management, and evolving behavioral guidelines. They force states to contend with new populations, in this case international football fans, a vast media apparatus, and corporate sponsors. One result is an expansion of local state apparatuses and their enmeshment in transnational security networks constituted by actors that are both public—e.g., Interpol—and private—e.g., executive protection agencies. Another is an enhanced attention to international image and reputation at the grassroots rather than inter-governmental level. A third is a unique devolution of power in terms of threat perception, judgement, and image management to ground-level public security workers.  

Drawing on first-hand observation at matches, fan events, and on public transit as well as security reports and media posts on social networks, this paper centers the idea of “disorder” as the core threat narrative deployed by the Qatari World Cup hosts. It constructs three cases of “feared disorder” from different aspects of the public safety apparatus active in Qatar during the World Cup. First, it examines how two initially permitted symbols, the rainbow flag and the “Woman Life Freedom” flag, were reconstructed as public safety threats by tournament security. Second, it explores evolving conceptions of personal security surrounding photography and surveillance, especially for citizens of the GCC. Finally, it looks at crowd management on public transit and in public spaces, with particular attention to the reliance on migrant workers to control vast numbers of fans. Finally, the paper examines the idea of “managed disorder” by tracing the evolution of Qatari treatment of public pro-Palestine sentiment over the course of the tournament.   

Author

• Sarah E. Parkinson, Johns Hopkins University