Channelling soft power: the Qatar 2022 World Cup, migrant workers, and international image

The overarching aim of this study was to examine the role of sport and, in particular, the impact of Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup in how Qatar has dealt with human rights scrutiny to protect its international image. The paper will investigate whether leveraging the rights and social legacy of migrant workers within Qatar during the 2022 World Cup has helped to achieve aspects of the state’s soft power aspirations thus far. While increased attention from the World Cup has shed light on the plight and suffering of low-skilled workers in Qatar thereby tarnishing its image globally and undermining its soft power aspirations, the state, drawing from a sport for development paradigm, has been able to leverage sport as a vehicle for reshaping its conventional national branding that has existed for decades. I conclude this paper by arguing that while migrant workers’ human rights in Qatar have been a source of scrutiny internationally, such discourses are being countered in part, but significantly, by the state which has employed mechanisms to showcase accountability and commitment towards international human rights standards and international development and thus restored its soft power abilities in the process. This paper makes an original contribution to the existing literature by documenting the chequered histories of labour relations in the context of mega-events but also in the context of global diplomacy, with particular reference to Qatar.