Understanding South Korea’s Use of Sports Mega-Events for Domestic, Regional and International Soft Power

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to the growing literature on ‘soft power’ by focusing on East Asia as a region gaining in political and economic significance; equally, we highlight the role sports mega-events play in the region’s most powerful states’ soft power strategies. For the purpose of this paper, we focus on South Korea’s soft power strategy and how the hosting of major sporting events has become a central part of this. We introduce both a novel tripartite approach to the study of the motives behind hosting sports mega-events, along with new, empirical data on the chosen case of South Korea. Our findings strengthen the notion that an explanation of why states seek to host major sports events can be better understood by considering the domestic, regional and international dimensions to capture the complexities behind such decisions.

The Perception of the Unified South-North Korean Women’s Ice Hockey Team for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games among Young Adults in South Korea

“…Sports exchange between South and North Korea is not designed to show each country's sports competitiveness, but to create an exchange effect that other sectors hardly achieve. It can be achieved through the creation of Korean national unity and face-to-face contacts between people in two countries (Grix et al, 2021). Therefore, respondents with 'inter-Korean interchange development type' are those who value the positive effect of sports exchanges rather than procedural fairness of the unified inter-Korean team formation.…”