رسائل دكتوراة
English
2019
FOOTBALL AS A POLITICAL AGENDA - A Study of a Politically-Manipulated Sport: The case of Algeria-Egypt 2010 World Cup and African Cup Qualification
Zohra Ghani, Hayat Aoumeur
كلية اللغات الأجنبية-جامعة عبد الحميد بن باديس مستغانم · الجزائر
This work attempts to highlight the influence of political agendas on the discourse of sport that goes around it and the impact of this discourse on the social (re)construction between Algeria and Egypt in 2009. It studies the political manipulation that marked the 2010 World Cup qualification matches. It aims at highlighting the reason behind challenging the peoples’ collective identity (the common-sense of belonging to a social group) that was socially-determined and politically-bewildered by the political Special Elite (Noam Chomsky’s conceptualization of the powerful leaders). Critical Discourse Analysis issued throughout the whole work in order to provide a critical analysis of events and actions, and establish a linkage between them for the sake of highlighting the concealed political agendas that manipulated the 2010 World Cup Qualification Matches. The theoretical framework studies the arena of football in the Arab World as an arena of political clashing discourse, as well as the conditioning of the atmosphere that pushed the discourse of sporting competition into a salient political discourse, whichapproached the diplomatictiesbetweenAlgeria and Egypt to their end. This studyprofoundly examines the scope of Sub-Arabism, as a new ideologicaltheory, and the politicalpolarization of thisideologicalapparatus to fulfil dominant political agendas. The practicalsideinvestigates the effects of thisdiscourse on the re-framing of a social identity, and highlights the concealedpolitical agendas thatmanipulatedthisidentity. The study assesses twenty-one newspaper articles, official reports, such as presidential speeches, and four videos. Thus, it examines the nuances that differentiate between the respond to/of individuals with politically-manipulated identities, and that of /to thosewhotrulyrepresenttheiridentities. The political polarization of football as a social institution challengednaturally-existing social identities, leading to the affiliation of Egyptian Ourness and Algerian Otherness through discourses of magnification and vilification. The latter were productrice the ideology of Sub-Arabism, which defines who the true Arabis. This ideological propaganda concealed major political interests, main of which was Djamal Mubarak’s inheritance of the Egyptian rule, and the political (re-)construction of the Algerian and Egyptian socio-political order
