‘Clearly Blown Away by the End of the Morning’s Drama’: Spectacle, Pacification and the 2010 World Cup, South Africa

Abstract

The massive security assemblages surrounding major sporting events and political summits embody two layers of spectacle. On the one hand, security operations are central to the governance of entertainment and media imagery. Simultaneously these security measures are profoundly theatrical and calibrated for the maximum visual impact: the spectacle of security itself. Some critical thinkers have described this dual spectacle as indicative of a contemporary state-corporate obsession with image and perception management, an obsession which detracts from ‘valid’ security concerns. By contrast I argue that spectacle and theatricality are in fact highly functional components of the pacification projects of state and capital. With reference to Guy Debord’s conception of ‘spectacle’, this article highlights how mega-events reveal, in highly dramatised form, the logic of pacification. Using the 2010 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) soccer World Cup as a case study, the article demonstrates how police and military power are mobilised to secure accumulation, to enforce social control and to extend the power and arsenal of the state security apparatus. What is truly spectacular about mega-event security is not just the incorporation of media templates into the working of state forces. Rather, the rhetoric and concept of security itself becomes a form of spectacular power as it serves to both obscure and justify how mega-events are ultimately projects of class power.

Dis-locating public space: Occupy Rondebosch Common, Cape Town

“…Further, the democratization, which is increasingly seen as electoral only, has sparked new understandings and practices of politics, especially in forming new publics (Be´nit-Gbaffou, 2011Be´nit-Gbaffou and Oldfield, 2011;Buire, 2011a;Selmeczi, 2012). In turn, these have been met with increasing state, and in particular, police violence, ''against dissent and the poor'' (McMichael, 2013). As McMichael's work demonstrates, while police violence revives fractures from ''the colonial and apartheid past,'' the South African Police Service has used global megaevents, such as the 2010 soccer World Cup, to fully develop its securitization program and today ''defends newer political and business interests established since 1994'' (McMichael, 2016).…”

Securitisation and the mega‐event: an editorial introduction

“…Among these, recent studies have empirically examined Olympic Games in Athens (Samatas ), Turin (Fonio and Pisapia ), Vancouver (Molnar ; Haggerty and Boyle ) and London (Fussey and Coaffee ). Others have provided analyses of international football tournaments, including FIFA World Cups in Germany (Baasch ; Eick ) and South Africa (McMichael ) and the UEFA European Championships in Austria and Switzerland (Klauser ). Other studies have emphasised more transnational features of mega‐event security, including the modes of professional knowledge transfer among practitioners (Klauser ) and the transportation of coercive techniques across temporal, territorial and ideological borders (Fussey et al .…”

The Permeable Olympic Fortress

“…Within these tendencies of mega-event security normalization and technological invention, it becomes increasingly crucial to explore how such measures are implemented and adapted to host cities that already present high levels of urban security challenges, principally in the societies of the so-called "Global South" (Giulianotti and Klauser 2009: 53). Th ere has been considerable research on the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, where sport mega-event security governance was carried out in persistent racially-divided and unequal social environments (Alegi and Bolsmann 2012; Cornelissen 2011;Eisenhauer et al 2013;Fonio and Pisapia 2015;McMichael 2013).…”