Spectacular International Labor Law: Ambush Counter-Marketing In the Spotlight of Qatar’s 2022 FIFA World Cup

Abstract

One year ago, the Qatar World Cup was in full swing, and Qatar was omnipresent in our public and private spheres. For many, the Qatar 2022 World Cup will forever be intimately connected with the plight of migrant workers. This Article dives into the confluence of spectacle, counter-marketing, international—labor and human rights—law, and local reforms, which came together in the long decade which followed FIFA’s fateful decision in December 2010 to give the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. It starts by situating the FIFA World Cup 2022 within Qatar’s drive for soft power and nation branding, before turning to re-counting how the 2022 World Cup was “ambushed” in the name of Qatar’s migrant workers and their rights, putting the issue on the global agenda and triggering the involvement of the ILO. Thereafter, the Article discusses the effects of this ambush counter-marketing by engaging with the labor reforms introduced by the Qatari government, while highlighting their limits in terms of scope and implementation. The Article concludes with a general discussion on the blind spots and shortcomings of the turn to counter-marketing as a strategy to vindicate international human rights or labor rights.

A. Introduction

In late 2022, the Qatar World Cup was in full swing and Qatar was omnipresent in our public and private spheres. Cities were debating whether they should broadcast the games¹ and international journalists were reporting daily the tragic stories of migrant workers.² We were in Qatar overdrive. Over the twelve years between the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) decision to grant the organization of the tournament to Qatar³ and the staging of the competition, the country occupied a disproportionate share—compared to its size in terms of population—of the global attention span. While Qatar was actively craving for attention when it bid for the World Cup, its rulers probably did not have this attention in mind.⁴ Indeed, for many, the Qatar 2022 World Cup will forever be intimately connected with the plight of migrant workers in Qatar. In this piece I propose to dive into the confluence of spectacle, counter-marketing, international—labor and human rights—law, and local reforms, which came together in the long decade which followed FIFA’s fateful decision in December 2010 to give the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. This confluence is not an isolated development; rather, it is part of a deliberate strategy pursued by some civil society organizations (CSOs) to leverage mega-sporting events (MSEs) in order to protest the human rights record of the host country and demand reforms.⁵ Furthermore, beyond the sporting context, this strategy is part of a wider embrace of naming and shaming by CSOs in the promotion and enforcement of human rights and international law.⁶ Recently, legal scholars have started to critically engage with the role of—counter—marketing in international law,⁷ my ambition is to build on and nurture this engagement through a case study on the Qatar 2022 World Cup. However, instead of international criminal law, the substantial focus of this contribution will be mostly on the vindication of international labor rights and human rights. The piece starts by situating the FIFA World Cup 2022 within Qatar’s drive for soft power and nation branding—Part B. It then turns to re-counting how the World Cup was “ambushed” in the name of Qatar’s migrant workers and their rights, putting the issue on the global agenda—Part C. While this part will highlight that the campaign was undoubtedly successful in leveraging the prospect of the 2022 World Cup to attract public attention to the issue and in activating international legal processes subjecting Qatar to institutionalized scrutiny, the next section will focus on the transformative effects of this ambush counter-marketing in Qatar—Part D. In this section I will engage with the many legislative and policy changes introduced by the Qatari authorities and their presentation as a success story. Yet, I will also argue that the reforms introduced have considerable blind spots—on collective bargaining or political participation, weaknesses in terms of their deficient implementation, and a fragile future now that the World Cup has moved on to the next host. Finally, I conclude with reflections on the blind spots and shortcomings of the turn to counter-marketing as a strategy to vindicate international human rights or labor rights in the context of MSEs—Part E.

B. A Dream Target: Qatar’s Global Brand and the FIFA World Cup 2022

In recent years, international relations scholars have increasingly recognized that states’ power on the international stage is not only military or economic, but also cultural or symbolic—“soft power”⁸ as famously coined by Nye. States now engage in “postmodern power”⁹ strategies involving marketing or branding, in order to attract attention and gain economic, cultural, or political influence on the world stage. As emphasized by Peter van Ham, “the art of politics pursued through old-style diplomacy has been shifting to encompass the new art of brand building and reputation management.”¹⁰ Specifically, the hosting of MSEs has been linked with attempts by emerging powers to augment their status on the international scene.¹¹ Sport is increasingly perceived by government as “a relatively cheap means of improving a nation’s image, credibility, stature, economic competitiveness, and (they hope) ability to exercise agency on the international stage.”¹² Indeed, MSEs have the capacity “to fix the gaze of a global television audience” and to constitute “a perfect platform to showcase the hosting nation, their culture and image.”¹³ In other words, “hosting a sporting mega-event can offer local leaders an opportunity to showcase their cities and their countries to the world—an exercise wherein nation-building, place-branding, and urban boosterism all intersect.”¹⁴

For small states with relatively limited military or economic might, like Qatar, finding alternative ways to increase their power and influence in international relations is a strategic priority.¹⁵ While Qatar was almost invisible on the international scene before the twenty-first century, the country purposefully leveraged its important economic resources to pursue a “soft power strategy”¹⁶ aimed at buttressing “the Qatar brand.”¹⁷ In short, “Qatar has emerged as a ‘brand state’ par excellence.”¹⁸ As J.E. Peterson put it, “[f]ew countries seem to have taken the lessons and importance of branding to heart more thoroughly than Qatar has in recent years.”¹⁹ This turn to branding is intimately connected with the sudden growth of Qatar’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the early 2000s, which was fueled by the rapid growth in the production of liquid natural gas. Qatar’s strategy of state branding was partly translated into a proactive, even to some extent hyperactive, sports diplomacy.²⁰ Sport became Qatar’s “medium of choice.”²¹ The country started to turn its attention to sport as a vehicle to increase its visibility on the international scene in the late nineties.²² Since then, Qatari officials progressively grew in influence inside sports governing bodies and started to draw significant international sporting events to Doha in the early 2000s.²³ At the same time, Qatar invested heavily in sports infrastructure to attract famous athletes to train in its facilities.²⁴ The hosting of the 2006 Qatar Asian Games was the high point of this early phase of Qatar’s turn to sport for global visibility.²⁵ Sport also became one of the pillars of Qatar’s National Vision 2030, adopted in 2008, and was prominently featured in the follow-up documents released by the Qatari government.²⁶ The organization of international sporting competitions is a central plank of Qatar’s push to become one of the world’s “sporting capital[s]”²⁷ and “establish itself as a modern sport oasis for years to come.”²⁸

Qatar’s bid to host the FIFA World Cup 2022 fits in this strategic approach to sport as a springboard for global influence and visibility.²⁹ The tournament was to serve as “a platform to announce itself [Qatar] as a legitimate actor on the world stage.”³⁰ In other words, the bid was an “innovative attempt to overcome one of the greatest hurdles faced by small sates [sic]: their invisibility on the world stage.”³¹ Accordingly, it seems anachronistic to frame Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup as sports-washing,³² as at the time of its bid the country had hardly any reputation—bad or otherwise—to wash; instead Qatar’s primary objective was to gain a global reputation through the “unprecedented global recognition”³³ offered by the FIFA World Cup. Ironically, this branding strategy also exposed Qatar’s cultural or social vulnerability,³⁴ which explains that it became an ideal target for a counter-marketing campaign aimed at its “soft disempowerment.”³⁵

C. Ambush Counter-Marketing in the Spotlight of the 2022 World Cup: How Migrant Workers Became Qatar’s Problem

After the awarding of the 2022 World Cup, came intense public scrutiny and controversy. The country became almost immediately subject to “relentless,”³⁶ even “enormous,”³⁷ pressure from human-rights advocates and the media. Put bluntly, Qatar came “under attack for allegedly being a slave state that treats migrant workers as serfs.”³⁸ As will be documented in this section, the media and CSOs leveraged the 2022 World Cup to put the fate of Qatar’s migrant workers onto the world’s agenda and to shame Qatar for failing to comply with its international obligations in this regard.

I. Putting Qatar’s Migrant Workers on the World’s Agenda: Ambush Counter-Marketing in the Spotlight of the FIFA World Cup

Back in the 2000s, Qatar was mostly absent of transnational public debates and would have been largely unknown to many people. The question of the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar—and more widely the in the Gulf countries—while already relevant in practice for many years, was then largely ignored by the media and leading CSOs and absent from the world’s attention span. The news that the FIFA World Cup would come to town put an end to this invisibility. This is reflected quantitatively in the intensity of the coverage of the issue by two global newspapers, The Guardian and The New York Times, and in the reporting of Amnesty International (“Amnesty”) and Human Rights Watch (“HRW”), as illustrated in Figure 1 below.³⁹ I have selected these sources due to their impact on public debates in my own public sphere—centered on Europe and the United States—they are not representative of the overall media attention or CSO involvement. These statistics inform us mainly about the evolution of the attention to Qatar’s migrant workers amongst organizations which have prioritized this matter in the past years.

Figure 1. Major publications with key terms “Qatar” and “migrant workers”.

Qatar’s migrant workers were literally put on the world’s agenda overnight. The number of publications mentioning Qatar and “migrant workers” issued by the four organizations shows, first, that Qatar’s migrant workers were of very marginal interest to them before 2010 and, second, that their reporting or advocacy on the issue picked up quickly after the attribution of the FIFA World Cup 2022. These numbers seem to support the idea of “NGOs as newsmakers,” which “play an increasingly crucial role in shaping and in some cases directly producing news coverage about some of the most pressing humanitarian and human rights issues of our time.”⁴⁰ In this regard, the tacit alliance between media and CSOs in the making of this issue is reminiscent of Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s transnational advocacy networks and their capacity to “mobilize information strategically to help create new issues and categories, and to persuade, pressurize, and gain leverage over much more powerful organizations and governments.”⁴¹

The “avalanche of criticism”⁴² linked to the abuses suffered by migrant workers is intimately connected to the attribution of the FIFA World Cup in its temporality, narrative, and visual dimension. Indeed, much of the reporting was expressly linking the plight of migrant workers with Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup. This connection was further reflected in the headlines used in the publications on this subject, as many stressed the fact that abuses against migrant workers were taking place “ahead of the World Cup.”⁴³ Others were more directly built around football references, such as Amnesty’s reference to the “Ugly Side of the Beautiful Game”⁴⁴ or HRW’s call for “Building a Better World Cup.”⁴⁵ Moreover, as I have highlighted elsewhere, news outlets and advocacy groups also systematically targeted FIFA in numerous reports, claiming that it shared significant responsibility with Qatar for these human rights abuses.⁴⁶ These reports were also accompanied by football-themed campaigns, such as Building and Wood Workers International’s (BWI) call for a “Red Card for FIFA”—which led to demonstrations before the FIFA headquarters⁴⁷—and Amnesty’s 2016 “Qatar World Cup of Shame” petition.⁴⁸

This act of tying together Qatar’s position as host of the FIFA World Cup 2022 with the abuses suffered by migrant workers is what I call “ambush counter-marketing.”⁴⁹ Instead of using the attention stemming from the competition in order to promote a commercial brand, CSOs relied on it to damage Qatar’s reputation. This phenomenon has been also captured as the “soft disempowerment”⁵⁰ of Qatar. It constitutes the reverse side of Qatar’s soft power strategy—indeed, as noted by van Ham, “countries can also be at the receiving end of a branding process.”⁵¹ Ironically, the 2022 World Cup became a vehicle “to introduce and educate many global audiences to the state [Qatar] in largely negative terms.”⁵²

II. Internationalizing the Issue: Framing the Plight of Migrant Workers as a Breach of Qatar’s International Obligations

In their reports, Amnesty and HRW systematically presented the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar as amounting to a breach of the country’s international obligations.⁵³ HRW’s first report in 2012 already stressed that “the exploitation and coercive circumstances in which workers found themselves amounted to conditions of forced labor or human trafficking, as defined under international law.”⁵⁴ It also alleged that Qatar by allowing Qatari workers to unionize but prohibiting migrant workers to do so was discriminating against the latter “in violation of international law.”⁵⁵ Holding that “the fact that Qatari law prohibits migrant workers from forming trade unions violates these workers’ right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, which is a core international labor right identified by the International Labor Organization (ILO).”⁵⁶ The text stressed that Qatar as an ILO member “has an obligation ‘to respect, to promote, and to realize’ core labor rights, including freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.”⁵⁷ Finally, HRW emphasized that “Qatar’s commitments to human rights fall below even an average standard,” as it had not ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which reflect “international best practice in protecting human rights.”⁵⁸ Overall these failures were qualified by HRW as “Domestic Protection Gaps.”⁵⁹

Similarly, Amnesty’s initial report in 2013 started by reviewing “Qatar’s international legal obligations,” underlining that even though it had not ratified the ICESCR and the ICCPR, it was still expected as a member of the UN Human Rights Council to “uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights.”⁶⁰ Furthermore, the report also outlined Qatar’s obligations as a member of the ILO, listing the ILO Conventions it had ratified and insisting that, by virtue of this membership, it “has to uphold fundamental principles and rights, including freedom of association and collective bargaining.”⁶¹ In this regard, Amnesty urged the Qatari authorities to “ensure that the right to freedom of association is respected for all people in its country.”⁶² It also argued that “the penalty for forcing a person to work is not adequate, and therefore inconsistent with Qatar’s obligations under the ILO Conventions.” ⁶³ As a final recommendation to the Qatari government, Amnesty urged Qatar to ratify a set of international instruments. ⁶⁴

Most of the ensuing reports and publications by Amnesty and HRW contain similar claims: They showcase the transformation of the issue into a matter of compliance with international—human rights and labor—law, turning the abuses suffered into a problem for the international community and the CSOs into “enforcers beyond borders”⁶⁵ of international commitments. In other words, Qatar’s ratification of a number of international treaties and ILO Conventions provided “the central ‘hook’”⁶⁶ to legitimize the CSOs calls for change. This leveraging of mega-sporting events to turn them into “human rights-promoting enterprises”⁶⁷ is not a new development, but it has been pushed to an extreme in the context of Qatar 2022. Furthermore, while HRW and Amnesty were engaging in a public-facing campaign to shame Qatar into respecting international law, the labor unions decided to wake up the ILO.

III. Waking Up a Sleeping Giant: Harnessing the ILO’s Shaming Potential

The ILO’s supervision of Qatar, which had joined the organization in 1972, was, in the early 2000s, concerned mostly with the child labor issues raised by the recourse to children as jockeys in camel races,⁶⁸ the discrimination of women in the labor market,⁶⁹ and the question of the forced labor of civil servants.⁷⁰ It was only after FIFA granted the 2022 World Cup to Qatar that the plight of migrant workers became the main focus of the ILO’s supervision.⁷¹ In January 2013, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and BWI made a representation under Article 24 of the Constitution of the ILO, alleging non-observance by Qatar of the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29) and the Labour Inspection Convention, 1947 (No. 81).⁷² The representation was deemed admissible and an ad hoc tripartite committee was set up to examine it.⁷³ This representation also triggered the interest of the ILO Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) in charge of supervising the compliance of the signatories with ILO Conventions.⁷⁴ On March 24, 2014, the ad hoc committee published its assessment concluding that allegations made by the ITUC and the BWI were credible and issued a set of recommendations, which were later endorsed by the ILO Governing Body.⁷⁵ On this basis, a number of delegates at the June 2014 International Labour Conference decided to lodge a formal complaint against Qatar under Article 26 of the ILO Constitution, alleging that the country failed to comply with the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29) and the Labour Inspection Convention, 1947 (No. 81).⁷⁶ This procedure is the main formal enforcement mechanism available in the context of the ILO.⁷⁷ The complaint was discussed in June 2015 by the Committee on the Application of Standards (CAS), which urged the Qatari government to implement a number of reforms.⁷⁸ A tripartite visit ensued in March 2016 to assess the reforms introduced by Qatar in response and its mission report substantiated most of the allegations made in the original complaint.⁷⁹ Consequently, the ILO Governing Body urged again the Qatari government to implement reforms.⁸⁰ This statement was followed in 2016 by the CEACR report, which came to the conclusion that the reforms introduced by Qatar from the start of the procedure did not put an end to the Kafala system and the related abuses, nor did they meaningfully improve the migrant workers’ access to remedy.⁸¹ Eventually, a new round of additional proposals were put forward by the Qatari government, which convinced the ILO’s Governing Body to close the complaint procedure in October 2017.⁸² The decision also provided for the signing between the ILO and Qatar of a comprehensive three-year technical cooperation program aimed at supporting the adoption and implementation of the proposed reforms.⁸³ This ILO–Qatar cooperation program, funded by Qatar, started operating in April 2018 with the establishment of an ILO Project Office in Doha and its mandate was prolonged for two years in 2021.⁸⁴

It is noteworthy that the plight of Qatar’s migrant workers came under the scrutiny of the ILO only after it obtained the right to organize the 2022 World Cup, although migrant workers in Qatar were long subjected to abusive living and working conditions. Thus, it seems that not only were the ambush counter-marketing campaigns an opportunistic consequence of the spotlight provided by the FIFA World Cup, so was the ILO’s activation. The role of the ILO vis-a-vis Qatar has been captured by Nicola Piper as one of a “nodal player on the pitch of networked governance,”⁸⁵ an intermediary between actors and governance levels in the process of change. Hence, in this context, the reputational and institutional enforcement of international labor law are intimately linked with and dependent on the spectacularization of the issue.⁸⁶ In fact, there is little to suggest that the ILO would have prosecuted this matter as forcefully without the attribution of the FIFA World Cup to Qatar.

The struggle for the rights of migrant workers in Qatar underscores the fundamental role of spectacle and marketing in the operation of international labor and human rights law. In fact, the ILO is not the only international organization which suddenly became concerned by this issue after the attribution of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.⁸⁷ The global attention linked to the World Cup was the trigger to the reformulation of this issue into an urgent international matter.⁸⁸ Yet, did the World Cup actually turn into the “agent of social and political change”⁸⁹ it was hoped to be?

D. Qatar’s Reformist Success Story: Counter Counter-Marketing in Action?

After a few years, the Qatari government proclaimed its willingness to implement a reformist agenda and started introducing sweeping reforms touching on many of the fundamental issues faced by migrant workers. This increasing responsiveness to counter-marketing and the ILO’s intervention can be linked to Qatar’s care for its international image.⁹⁰ Yet, if one looks beyond the law in the books and turns to the law in action, this reformist narrative starts to unravel.

I. The FIFA World Cup as “Monkey Wrench for Change”: Celebrating Qatar’s Reformism

It seems that after a stage of denial,⁹¹ Qatar’s rulers came to the conclusion that they had “no choice but to start addressing the issue.”⁹² Especially after the activation of the ILO’s supervisory processes, Qatar started to regularly announce reforms aimed at tackling specific problems faced by migrant workers.⁹³ For example, with regard to the ability of migrant workers to freely move between Qatari employers and out of the country, we can trace a multiplicity of legislative changes, which have progressively—at least theoretically—reduced the level of dependency of migrant workers on their Qatari employers. While the first reforms proposed in 2015 were decried as cosmetic and superficial in nature,⁹⁴ since then the Qatari government has introduced reforms which allow migrant workers to leave the country without the authorization of their employer,⁹⁵ and eased their ability to switch between employers.⁹⁶ These reforms were celebrated as putting a definitive end to the infamous kafala system.⁹⁷ Other flagship changes include the introduction of a minimum wage,⁹⁸ the creation of Workers’ Dispute Resolution Committees and Labor Disputes Settlement Committees,⁹⁹ and tighter restrictions applying to outside work during the summer period.¹⁰⁰

The reforms have received a varying level of praise from the main CSOs involved in the counter-marketing campaign, such as HRW, Amnesty, ITUC and BWI.¹⁰¹ The head of ILO’s mission in Qatar even called them “revolutionary” and a set of “historic achievements.”¹⁰² Indeed, if one focuses only on the scope of legislative and regulatory change on paper, it is arguable that the calls for “seizing the moment”¹⁰³ and “leveraging the World Cup”¹⁰⁴ as a “catalyst for labor reform”¹⁰⁵ were heeded. Even critical voices acknowledged that Qatar has brought in “relatively strong labour codes that provide minimum standards of working hours, rest periods, entitlements and wages.”¹⁰⁶ From this perspective, the World Cup fulfilled its role as a “monkey wrench for change”¹⁰⁷ by generating “positive externalities”¹⁰⁸ in the form of new laws and policies. This is a “legacy”¹⁰⁹ that FIFA is more than happy to celebrate in its public communication,¹¹⁰ while Qatari officials embrace the “transformational power”¹¹¹ of the World Cup as part of the country’s modernization journey.

Yet, this Hollywoodian success story of transformative change is not the whole story. Instead, there is some evidence that this flurry of new legislation and policies had limited practical effects on the ground.

II. Plus ça change, moins ça change: Qatar’s Potemkin Reforms

“The people who say the World Cup made things better for workers in Qatar are probably tourists.” ¹¹²

“Qatar can do the dance with western critics, knowing well that it doesn’t have to change anything on the ground.” ¹¹³

Undoubtedly, Qatar changed a lot over the past decade, and so did the legislative and administrative rules which govern migrant workers. Yet, this change is not necessarily as broad, effective, or long-lasting as hoped.

First, it is important to acknowledge what didn’t change over the past years. Migrant workers have not gained any political rights in Qatar—they remain very far from Fraser’s ideal of the “parity of participation”¹¹⁴ in authorized contests over justice. Unlike other “networks of outrage,”¹¹⁵ demands for political or industrial democracy were not prominent in the public debates surrounding the 2022 World Cup, and, thus, were largely ignored in Qatar’s response to it. This absence is a key limiting factor that is jeopardizing the implementation of the substantive reforms achieved. Concretely, no real progress has been made on collective bargaining and unionization of migrant workers. Instead, in the lead-up to the World Cup, workers’ rights activists and—unofficial—workers representatives were regularly targeted and deported by the authorities.¹¹⁶ This inability to put workplace democracy at the center of the reforms might be linked to the lesser visibility or dramatic nature of the issue, and, therefore, to its lower value as a source of scandalization and counter-marketing. Consequently, both in the political sphere and in the economic one, migrant workers remain unrepresented and deprived of a say in the way the Qatari state and corporations govern their lives.

Second, there are signs that the reforms achieved are “only on paper,”¹¹⁷ a “façade,”¹¹⁸ or “more like suggestions.”¹¹⁹ Indeed, the media and some CSOs have in the past months continued to regularly document abuses,¹²⁰ which are in fundamental contradiction with the newly adopted rules. The lifting of the need for a non-objection certificate in order to shift between Qatari employers offers a good example of the concrete social and legal mechanisms at play in watering down the reforms introduced.¹²¹ While this requirement was lifted by Qatar in 2020 through two Decrees,¹²² in practice migrant workers still face considerable hurdles to change employers. Recently, only nine out of sixty-one workers surveyed by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre said they could change jobs during their stay in Qatar.¹²³ In light of the stiff resistance by Qatari businessmen to the changes on this issue, the Qatari authorities have increased the administrative burden to vindicate one’s right to switch between Qatari employers.¹²⁴ Moreover, there is evidence that Qatari employers made use of a wide range of deterrence strategies, through material or administrative sanctions, to strongly increase the practical costs of such a switch.¹²⁵ For example, it has been reported that new employers continue to request an official discharge from the previous employer before hiring a migrant worker.¹²⁶ To summarize, on this fundamental issue, which is conditioning the power balance between employees and employers, the gap between the rights on paper and in practice remains purposefully wide.

Qatar’s overhaul of its judicial and administrative systems to provide greater access to justice to migrant workers is another example of a similar gap.¹²⁷ The Qatari authorities and the ILO have promoted the new processes available to migrant workers in order to claim their rights as seamless and efficient, but these were quickly undermined by discrete administrative decisions. For example, a Ministerial Decision of 2022 considerably reduced the attractiveness of pursuing claims through Qatar’s Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund by putting a cap on the maximum disbursement of financial entitlements.¹²⁸ In general, migrant workers face considerable material hurdles to access justice, as Qatari employers regularly retaliate against those who are claiming their rights,¹²⁹ often pushing them into extreme poverty and precarious living conditions.¹³⁰ Hence, it is not unusual for them to simply leave the country before they have been able to secure any compensation and abandon their claim.¹³¹ These examples are a reminder that legislation, when it is not coupled with institutional safeguards and social buy-in, can have a different effect in practice than expected. In short, Qatari reforms might have been drafted for an international audience and applied for a local one. This would correspond to the “tactical concession phase”¹³² identified by Risse and Ropp in their model focusing on the enforcement of human rights, Qatar “talks the talk” externally while adopting contradictory discourses and policies internally.

Finally, there is the unanswerable question of the future. After the attention brought by the 2022 World Cup recedes, will Qatar just turn back the clocks on the reforms? Formulated differently by a migrant worker: “What will happen when no one is looking?”¹³³ There seem to be a widespread perception amongst migrant workers and labor unions that this is a very serious possibility or even already happening.¹³⁴ It’s unclear at this stage whether the World Cup’s finish will mark the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end for Qatar’s reforms. But if the past is a reliable guide to the present, a further backtracking on the limited labor reforms adopted would not be surprising.¹³⁵ While measuring the impact of the ambush counter-marketing strategy is a difficult task, we have identified serious cracks in the rosy reformist narrative embraced by FIFA, Qatar, and the ILO.

E. The Limits of Ambush Counter-Marketing in Securing the Rights of Qatar’s Migrant Workers

As I have documented, the Qatar 2022 World Cup provided the backdrop to a massive public campaign aimed at vindicating the rights of migrant workers. In terms of putting this issue on the world’s agenda, the “ambush counter-marketing” pursued by CSOs with the support of global media outlets was an unmitigated success. Furthermore, this attention led to the institutional activation of the ILO and its engagement with a matter that it had until then completely overlooked, which in turn increased the public pressure on the Qatari authorities, ultimately leading to the emirate adopting a number of reforms. Narrated like this, the Qatar 2022 saga turns into a Hollywoodian success story for all parties involved: FIFA kindly provided the spotlight, the CSOs’ stamina and the ILO’s authority pushed the rights of Qatar’s migrant workers under it, and Qatar bowed to the public pressure and reformed the country. In this story, the practical meaning of rights grounded in international law becomes a proxy of public attention and indignation. In other words, without the 2022 World Cup, the abuses suffered by the same migrant workers would most likely have remained invisible and the ILO reticent to intervene. As pointed out by Schwöbel-Patel, “in today’s visual society, if you are not seen, you do not exist,”¹³⁶ what Kennedy called the “tip of the iceberg problem.”¹³⁷ Invisibility, ephemerality and inequality are the reverse side of this reliance on spectacle as driver for change.¹³⁸

But does it matter? If counter-marketing delivers change for those that are systematically abused and whose rights are violated, who cares about the strategy used to get there? The problem might be that when law turns into an instrument of communication, then legislative change—such as the reforms introduced by the Qatari government—can also be instrumentalized to diffuse risks to a national brand. Over the past decade, the Qatari authorities mastered the art of claiming credit for reformism, while on the ground the experience of migrant workers seems to have improved only marginally. The reforms were rather reminiscent of what Wolfe called, in the context of the Olympics, Potemkinism: “[A] condition that appears successful and whole, but in actuality disguises something missing, unpleasant, or broken.”¹³⁹ We are reminded of the old legal realist distinction between law in the books and the law in action. In order to achieve change through legislative reforms, one needs to also address the institutions and processes that channel rules into actions. In our case, the collaborative efforts of the media, CSOs, ILO, and other labor organizations did achieve rule change on paper, but failed in opening a space for political representation inside the Qatari state and corporations for the migrant workers living in the country. Now that the shining lights of the World Cup have been switched off, frustration in the face of the limited changed achieved is increasingly voiced,¹⁴⁰ but the public leverage gained through counter-marketing has vanished with the removable stadiums. Ultimately, it might be that the organizations which publicized the fate of Qatar’s migrant workers in the first place were the main beneficiaries of this decade.¹⁴¹ In some cases, there is evidence that some of the actors involved benefitted financially from their involvement in Qatar’s reform process.¹⁴²

What does this tell us about the role of MSEs in achieving social change and defending the rights of the marginalized in the host country?¹⁴³ Undoubtedly, MSEs—especially the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics—offer a hook for mobilizing global public attention and for raising the profile of an unjust situation,¹⁴⁴ which can serve as a lever for change when the state concerned cares about its brand or reputation—like Qatar did.¹⁴⁵ Yet, the change achieved risks being “more about pretense than practice,”¹⁴⁶ another discursive move on a global communication battlefield. In this regard, ambush counter-marketing serves as potent driver for reforms, but the latter are primarily “iterations of public relations spiel with kernels of truth.”¹⁴⁷ Deeper transformative change in host countries of MSEs is likely to require sustained and locally embedded social mobilization in order to affect the local balance of power, as meaningful change can come only with a strengthened accountability of local institutions—be they political, legal, or economical to those that are affected and abused by them. As pointed out by Gay Seidman,

[w]hen transnational labor campaigns seek to strengthen workers’ voices, creating channels for articulation and collective representation—rather than simply publicizing the worst kinds of abuses—they are in a better position to help construct new visions of citizenship, create new possibilities for voice and participation, and strengthen labor rights for workers across borders.¹⁴⁸

Ultimately, the time-bound public indignation which surrounded the 2022 World Cup seems to have done little to reinforce the agency of the migrant workers themselves, giving the impression that they “have deliberately been excluded from the negotiations and advocacy around their human right.”¹⁴⁹ Like the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the 2022 World Cup had undoubtedly an impact “in the realm of vocabulary, discourse, and the exchange of ideas,”¹⁵⁰ but its transformative effects in Qatari society and politics are not evident.

Finally, this case study underlines the role of spectacle and counter-marketing in the struggle for international labor rights and the contingency of the attention-driven advocacy resulting from it. It offers as well a sobering account of the transformative effects achieved by such strategies,¹⁵¹ and should encourage scholars to conduct in depth qualitative investigations when assessing the reforms triggered. Ultimately, this points at the need to be modest about the change that can be attained through ambush counter-marketing and to be aware of its dependence on the mobilization of local actors. Instead, the risk is that these “awareness-raising campaigns, through aiming to ‘sell’ global justice, tend to construct a consumer of global injustice rather than a political actor of global justice.”¹⁵² Moreover, such marketing-driven strategies might submerge “alternative political sites—diplomacy, national legislatures, grass-roots movements—and vocabularies which may be more useful, more likely to emancipate, more likely to encourage habits of engagement, solidarity, and responsibility, more open to surprise and reconfiguration.”¹⁵³ In sum, without broad-based social and political mobilization leading to political inclusion and equality, migrant workers can hardly gain what Arendt called the “right to have rights”¹⁵⁴ both in Qatar and beyond.¹⁵⁵ For such a task, “playing informational politics”¹⁵⁶ in the spotlight of MSEs might simply not be enough.