Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters - What Political Science Teaches Us About the World Cup and World Peace

What Political Science Teaches Us About the World Cup and World Peace

07/03/19 • 26 min

Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

I've been following with glee the US Women's National Soccer Team's run in this year's World Cup. At time of recording, the United States was set to face either Netherlands or Sweden in the finals.

It turns out that political science has something to say about whether or not international sporting events like this contributes to peace and security--or not.

Last year, I interviewed the author of a peer reviewed study that found a rather significant correlation between success in the mens world cup and an outbreak in conflict. The political scientist Andrew Bertoli created a data set of every world cup from 1958 to 2010 and found that countries that qualified for the World Cup were significantly more likely to start an international conflict than countries that did not quality.

Andrew Bertoli is a professor at IE University in Spain. When we recorded this interview, right before the 2018 Winter Olympics, he was a post-doc fellow at Dartmouth.

The study we discuss was titled Nationalism and Conflict: Lessons from International Sports appears in the December 2017 issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.

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I've been following with glee the US Women's National Soccer Team's run in this year's World Cup. At time of recording, the United States was set to face either Netherlands or Sweden in the finals.

It turns out that political science has something to say about whether or not international sporting events like this contributes to peace and security--or not.

Andrew Bertoli is a professor at IE University in Spain. When we recorded this interview, right before the 2018 Winter Olympics, he was a post-doc fellow at Dartmouth.

The study we discuss was titled Nationalism and Conflict: Lessons from International Sports appears in the December 2017 issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.

Unlock bonus episodes and access to an exclusive daily global news clips service by becoming a premium subscriber

https://www.patreon.com/GlobalDispatches

Previous Episode

What Comes Next in the Escalating Crisis With Iran?

Events are unfolding rapidly between the United States and Iran. At time of recording, it was reported that Trump ordered and then called off a military strike against Iran in retaliation for the downing of a US surveillance drone over the gulf of Oman. Meanwhile, Iran is threatening to take actions that would put it in direct violation of the nuclear deal, otherwise known as the JCPOA and Europe is trying is darndest to hold the deal together.

There are a lot of moving pieces right now, so I wanted to bring you an episode that gives you some context and background for understanding and interpreting events as they unfold in the coming weeks and months. To that end, I could think of no better interlocutor than Laicie Heeley. She is the host of a fantastic podcast called Things That Go Boom. She just wrapped up her second season, which was all about the Iran Nuclear Deal. The podcast tells the story behind the Iran nuclear deal in a really interesting and entertaining way, and I'd urge people to check it out.

In our conversation today, we kick off discussing Europe's efforts to salvage the deal and the tough position Europe finds itself in. And then we have a forward looking conversation about some of the key decisions that Iran, the United States and Europe will be forced to make that could determine whether this crisis leads to war.

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Why Turkey's Municipal Elections are of Global Significance

When Reccep Tayyep Erdogan party, the AKP, won a landslide victory in Turkey's 2002 general elections he became a very different kind of Turkish leader from his predecessors. The AKP is a religious party in what was an avowedly secular political tradition.

For a time, Erdogan presided over a booming economy and was hailed for being a modernizing muslim leader in a troubled region. His relations with Europe and the United States were strong, and he sought to play a stabilizing role in the middle east.

But all the while, Erdogan was consolidating his power. It started slowly at first and in recent years the degradation of Turkey;s independent institutions has accelerated. This includes clampdown on media and the corruption of the courts and a massive political purge following what Erdogan alleged was an attempted coup in 2016.

Erdogan was become the quintessential example of a new kind of leader around the world--the illiberal authoritarian democrat. That is, someone who is democratically elected, but then systematically uses the power of the state to entrench himself in power.

This brings us to recent events in Turkey. On March 31, an opposition leader Ekrem Immoglu won election as Mayor of Istanbul, a position incidentally that Ergoan held before he became Prime minister. Election authorities, clearly at Erdogan's request, invalidated those results and called for a re-run of the election and weeks later, Immoglu won again--this time by a wider margin.

So what does this election tell us about Ergodan's hold on power and the trajectory of Turkish politics? On the line with me to explain the global significance of municipal elections in Turkey is Howard Eisentstat, he is an associate professor of middle eastern history atSt Lawrence University and senior non-resident fellow a the Project on Middle East Democracy.

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