The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

  By James M. Dorsey To watch a video version of this story on YouTube please click  here. A podcast version is available on Soundcloud,   Itunes ,  Spotify ,  Spreaker , and   Podbean. US President Joe Biden positions the Ukraine war as a battle between autocracy and democracy. That reduces what is at stake in the war. The stakes constitute a fundamental building block of a new 21st-century world order: the nature of the state. Russia's invasion of Ukraine represents the sharp end of the rise of a critical mass of world leaders who think in civilizational rather than national terms. They imagine the ideational and/or physical boundaries of their countries as defined by history, ethnicity, culture, and/or religion rather than international law. Often that assertion involves denial of the existence of the other and authoritarian or autocratic rule. As a result, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in good company when he justifies his invasion of Ukraine by asserting th

  James M. Dorsey and sports journalist Karim Zidan discuss the issues. To watch a video version of this discussion on YouTube please click  here. A podcast version is available on Soundcloud,   Itunes ,  Spotify ,  Spreaker , and   Podbean. The 2022 Qatar World Cup has come and gone. Most fans will remember the exhilarating matches and the dramatic final. They will recall the emergence of Morocco as the tournament’s darling. For some, the politics will stick in their mind: expressions of support for the Palestinians, struggles over support for LGBTQ rights, and the unprecedented more than a decade-long campaign by human rights groups and trade unions to improve the working and living conditions of migrant workers. The tournament may be history but the often-fierce debate about Qatar is not. To be sure, the debate has moved on. It focusses on lessons learnt from a country that at least when it came to workers rights was willing to engage. Those lessons are particularly releva