Sportswashing: Complicity and Corruption
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Abstract
When the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup was awarded to Qatar, it raised a number of moral
concerns, perhaps the most prominent of which was Qatar’s woeful record on human rights
in the arena of migrant labour. Qatar’s interest in hosting the event is aptly characterised
as a case of ‘sportswashing’.
The first aim of this paper is to provide an account of the nature of sportswashing,
as a practice of using an association with sport, usually through hosting an event
or owning a club (such as Newcastle United, owned by Saudi Arabia), to subvert the
way that others attend to a moral violation for which the sportswashing agent is responsible.
This may be done through distracting away from wrongdoing, minimising it, or normalising
it.
Second, we offer an account of the distinctive wrongs of sportswashing. The gravest
moral wrong is the background injustice which sportswashing threatens to perpetuate.
But the distinctive wrongs of sportswashing are twofold: first, it makes participants
in sport (athletes, coaches, journalists, fans) complicit in the sportswasher’s wrongdoing,
which extends a moral challenge to millions of people involved with sport. Second,
sportswashing corrupts valuable heritage associated with sporting traditions and institutions.
Finally, we examine how sportswashing ought to be resisted. The appropriate forms
of resistance will depend upon different roles people fill, such as athlete, coach,
journalist, fan. The basic dichotomy of resistance strategies is to either exit the
condition of complicity, for example by refusing to participate in the sporting event,
or to modify one’s engagement with the goal of transformation in mind. We recognize
this is difficult and potentially burdensome: sports are an important part of many
of our lives; our approach attempts to respect this.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25569Collections
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Kyle Fruh
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke Kunshan University

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