Abstract:
For most South Africans, regardless of their interest in foreign policy, the advent
of 2010 signalled a major and distinctly foreign engagement: South Africa’s
hosting of the FIFA1 World Cup. This much anticipated event, hosted for the first
time on the African continent, induced a frenzy of infrastructural projects, security
arrangements and reorganisation of other national priorities. The imperious
presence of FIFA officials in the country during the preparation for and staging
of the World Cup irked many observers, both domestic and foreign, and fed into
a simmering International Relations (IR) debate on the behaviour of powerful nonstate
actors. The increasing ability and even inclination of such actors to encroach
on state sovereignty in pursuit of commercial gain has generated concern,
particularly in the developing world. As Jakkie Cilliers points out, FIFA
commands governments to spend billions of dollars on sport infrastructure
‘literally irrespective of local development needs’ while the net beneficiary of all
this expenditure is FIFA itself.2 In South Africa’s case, this concern is underlined
by the fact that the 2010 World Cup turned out to be FIFA’s most profitable ever.
