By Hadas Aron and Emily Holland

When swimmer Russian swimmer Yulia Efimova entered the Olympic swimming pool in Rio ahead of the 100m breaststroke finals the crowd booed loudly. Efimova, who had previously been banned from competition twice for doping, is a controversial figure at the Rio Olympics and has been embroiled in a major drama over the race to gold in the breaststroke. It was another chapter of the ongoing drama in the breaststroke race. Efimova’s chief contender, Lilly King, had said in an interview after the semi finals, “You’re shaking your finger ‘No. 1’ and you’ve been caught for drug cheating…I’m not a fan.” The crowd in Rio was not a fan either. King went on to win the gold medal and did not hesitate to rub it in, exclaiming to the press, “It just proves that you can compete clean and still come out on top with all the work you put in.” No one likes a cheater, so at first glance it seems only natural that the crowd sided with King: the Russian doping scandal dominated the headlines before the games even began, and Efimova herself failed a substance test twice. But beyond unsportsmanlike behavior, the Russian swimmer’s response to critics made a valid point, “I always thought the cold war was long in the past. Why start it again, by using sport?”

Booing Efimova may be about sportsmanship on the surface, but it reflects a deeper cultural paradigm on both the individual and the international levels. On the individual level, as much as Westerners would like her to be, Efimova is hardly a Russian uber villain. As elaborated by Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post, Efimova trains in Los Angeles rather than Russia. Her first doping offense was due to a banned substance found in a legal supplement she bought at GNC and was deemed an honest mistake. Her suspension was accordingly reduced. The second offense was caused by a prescribed medication provided by her Russian doctors that was only banned in January 2016. The timing of the ban and the fact that she may have consumed the substance only before it became banned and is the reason she was allowed to participate in the Olympics in the first place. Despite media coverage to the contrary, Efimova is a talented swimmer, and not an evil Russian spy.

Because we are political scientists, the international aspect of the Efimova affair is even more interesting to us. We agree with Efimova (not about everything: swimming the breaststroke seven hours a day sounds almost worse than writing a dissertation): there is a definitive Cold War vibe to these Rio Olympic Games. Under the guise of clean sports, the so-called Western world is aligning behind the US and showing open hostility toward Russia and even its traditional allies. True, the scale of the Russian doping scandal is likely huge, but other countries have been implicated in similar doping scandals before and received have been much less vilified. Jamaican athletes for example, have persistently failed drug tests, and yet, while the suspicion toward Jamaican athletes is present, the hostility is decidedly absent. As the Russians rightly pointed out, doping in sport is universal, but few countries are openly booed by the international crowds and antagonized by their peers.  As we argued before, the Olympics is ultimately an exercise in nationalism, and vilifying Russians is familiar territory. 
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In the eyes of Westerners, and particularly Americans, Russians are already villains, so  any evidence of their “evil ways” underscore old narratives and seem to prove what we already know to be “true”. Although the US has made new “evil” enemies since the end of the Cold War, international terrorists do not compete under their own flag in the Olympics. Countries from which terrorist emerge are either victimized, and thus worthy of our Western pity, or are not competitive at major sports so we never even get the chance to see them. In this soft power game only the big  kids can play, and so only the big traditional international animosities reemerge. But wasn’t there a time when Americans didn’t hate the Russians and everyone just got along? Of course, but it was during the 1990s when Russia was weak and non-threatening both on and off the podium.

The idea that large ideological international competitions are being played out in microcosm at the Olympic Games is underscored by the wide range of participants. Lily King and the Americans aren’t the only bullies on the playground: Australia’s Mack Horton called China’s Sun Yang a drug cheat, with France’s Camille Lacourt jumping in and accusing Yang of “pissing purple.” The reaction was swift and telling: in the wake of the accusations Chinese media and social media users called the remarks “disrespectful to China” “evil”, “gross” and “ignorant.” One user Chinese user wrote, “There is a scientific explanation for why he [Horton] swims so fast. It’s because he’s light, he has no brain.”

One of the projects we have been working on is about international state reputations: how, why and under what conditions are they are formed? Can countries do something to change them? When will these efforts succeed? The Olympic Games are great opportunity to examine the persistence of state reputations in popular media and culture because the whole point of the games is one of friendly international competition. The reaction to Efimova and Sun Yang show that despite major changes to the international system, Western attitudes towards our traditional rivals have long shadows. 

By Emily Holland and Hadas Aron

Every four years, people all around the world, many of whom are otherwise uninterested in sport (I’m looking at you political scientists), are drawn to their couches to eat pizza and cheer as athletes perform super human achievements. But in addition to the anticipation, melodrama and tension of watching Simone Biles twist and flip through the air, the Olympics is a fascinating study of international relations in practice. Here, we examine the Olympics with the “impartial” eye of trained social scientists, applying the theories we struggle to teach undergraduates to several aspects of the games.

1. The Parade of Nations. The highlight of the Olympic opening ceremony is the Parade of Nations, where athletes from all participating “nations” march together in matching uniforms waving their national flags. As former students will no doubt tell you, one of the first lessons in any introductory international relations class is the difference between a state and nation. Need a refresher course? Max Weber’s oft quoted definition of a state  is a human community which lays claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.”  In contrast, a nation is a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory. While we won’t bore you (any further) with detailed analysis of the marked difference between the two definitions, suffice it to say that many of the “nations” competing in the Olympics are not nations at all…they are states. Some participants, like Libya, are neither states nor nations. And what about the team from Chinese Taipei? Well that too is neither state nor nation: it is just the name agreed upon in the Nagoya Resolution whereby the ROC and People’s Republic of China agree to recognize each other for the purposes of the Olympics only.
2. Nationalism. The Olympic Games are all about nationalism. Athletes compete for their country, for the opportunity to see their flag rise or ideally even hear their national anthem playing on the podium.  The entire games are ripe with national symbolism. In popular culture there are two types of nationalism good and bad. The good nationalism promotes national economies and protects rights in the name of belonging to a community of citizens, encourages pride in Nobel winners and other accolades, and builds trust and cooperation between co-nationals. The bad nationalism ignites wars, sets neighbors against each other, and builds fences (or walls) between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The Olympics enables otherwise liberal citizens to engage in extraordinary patriotism: proudly waving flags, wearing national colors, and rooting for members of their own tribe to beat all the others without the threat of violence. In other words, the Olympics is a pillar of “good nationalism”, and good nationalism is necessary for our world order.
3. The Olympics as a guardian of the traditional world order. Eagle eyed viewers of the Olympics may have noticed several unusual “nations” participating under their own flag. Palestine, although not technically a “state,” is engaged in an old school struggle for self-determination recognition. In this respect, participating in the Olympics under their own national flag is akin to official recognition in the United Nations. Parading a team of athletes wearing traditional dresses, kaffiyeh scarves and waving a Palestinian flag is nothing short of a political statement. In the Olympics, as in the UN, international recognition is the key to national success. This idea dates back at least to 1919, but is it still relevant today in a world of constant migration, multinational states and failed states? In some cases the team manages to represent state and nation: consider the national soccer teams of France in 1998 or Germany in 2014 World Cups, both multicultural and giving the appearance of a new tolerant nation. Team USA too is an image many Americans can identify with. However, other ‘national’ teams fail to represent the variety of cultures and ethnicities of their state, and are correspondently supported only by distinct groups.
4. Team Refugee. Perhaps the most moving aspect of the opening ceremony was the march of Team Refugees. “These refugees have no home, no team, no flag, no national anthem,” said Thomas Bach, International Olympic Committee president when announcing the selection of athletes. Indeed, in a world of states, the stateless are in the worst possible position. It is certainly true for refugees from conflict ridden areas, and the team’s march is a rightful call to leaders and citizens of strong states to neglect them no longer. As an afterthought, while we justly view states as a source of order, huge numbers of people are living in semi stateless conditions. Some are the fortunate wealthy, evading taxes through constant movement, some we call “expats”: Westerners living in a foreign community of their own making, some are international students, or international workers, and some live in areas, all over the globe, where state presence is hardly felt and services are not provided. The Olympics attempts to mask all of these realities and lends states a sense of normality and permanence, at least for 16 days of glory.
5. Olympic Carpetbaggers. While watching the women’s gymnastics qualifications, our interest was piqued when a young woman named Kylie Rei Dickson appeared on the floor under the national flag of Belarus. Now I don’t know about you, but the authors, having spent a considerable amount of time in former Soviet states, have rarely heard of Belrausian women named “Kylie,” who sound suspiciously Southern Californian. In fact, Ms. Dickson is not Belarusian. She is from Los Angeles, has never been to Belarus and is not of Belarusian descendance. Apparently, any athlete can compete under any flag, as long as they acquire dual citizenship. Because Ms. Dickson did not qualify for the US team but still wanted to compete at the Olympics, she reached out to Belarus, acquired Belarusian citizenship and voila. Other athlete-nation combinations include a 55 year old German businessman named Christian Zimmerman who is competing in dressage as part of the Palestinian team and pole vaulter Giovanni Lanaro, a southern Californian of Italian descent competing for Mexico. Some countries even make poaching athletes a national policy. Foreign Policy wrote in  an article in 2014 that “Qatar, meanwhile, invests heavily in athletes from both Kenya and Bulgaria. In 2000, Qatar’s government bought an entire Bulgarian weightlifting team—eight athletes in total—in exchange for citizenship and a little over $1 million. In 2003, it also reportedly bought two Kenyan long-distance runners: Stephen Cherono and Albert Chepkurui, who duly became Qatari Olympians Saif Saeed Shaheen and Ahmad Hassan Abdullah (neither Cherono nor Chepkurui were actually Muslim).” This works out for everyone, the athletes get to compete and  countries get to have a team. Of course, it also undermines the political statist goals of the Olympics, and demonstrates a lack of social investment in many states. 

Having said all this, the Olympics are still an enormous source of summer entertainment, with incredible personal stories, and of course, Katie Ledecky. But in those dead hours of badminton and handball (or another sport you find painfully dull, we mean no offense), we invite you to consider the political machine behind the human achievement.

By Emily Holland

​In the long-list of incendiary and shocking comments to have escaped from Donald Trump’s mouth in recent months, his recent call inciting the Russian intelligence services to conduct cyber-espionage against his opponent Hillary Clinton is amongst the most shocking. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”, exclaimed Trump in a press conference this week. In this wake of this comment, news outlets have pounced on Trump’s soft stance towards and apparent connections with Russia. But his borderline-treasonous remarks aside, Trump’s calls for improved relations with Moscow are not unreasonable. What is more troubling is not that his associates have links to Moscow, but the fact that they are his associates at all.
 
Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has worked extensively with disgraced and exiled former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, helping him win the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. Yanukovych was famously overthrown in the Maidan Revolution, his now abandoned Mezhyhirya palace a symbol of dictatorial opulence. Although Manafort’s association with Yanukovych is distasteful, it is hardly illegal. But what is seriously worrying is the fact that Manafort worked extensively in Ukrainian politics at all: as I have written before, Ukrainian politics is amongst the most corrupt and venal in the world. If Manafort helped Yanukovuch win the 2010 election, he necessarily participated in corrupt practices.
 
Manafort is not the only Trump associate to have links to an extremely corrupt industry. The coordinator of the Washington diplomatic corps for the Republicans in Cleveland was Frank Mermoud, a former state department official and director of Club Energy, a Ukrainian oil and gas company. My own dissertation research demonstrates the endemic corruption of the oil and gas industry in many former Soviet states. Ukraine’s energy industry is shockingly corrupt: the murky ties between Moscow, Kiev and third-party “gas middlemen” are extensive. This in part explains why Ukraine has been so unsuccessful at weaning itself of dangerous energy dependence on Moscow despite two major crises in 2006 and 2009.
 
 In the wake of the 2006 Russo-Ukrainian “gas war”, which left Ukraine without access to natural gas supplies in the middle of winter for several days, Gazprom, the Russian state gas conglomerate, and Naftogaz Ukraine, the Ukrainian state energy company, signed a new contract to end the dispute. One of the provisions of the contract stipulated that Russia would not deliver gas directly to Ukraine but would deliver instead to a third party: RosUkrEnergo. RosUkrEnergo is co-owned by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who has made billions by buying Russian gas on the cheap and selling it to Ukraine at inflated prices. In my estimation, at certain point between 2006 and 2009, Firtash’s RosUkrEnergo was making between $3 and $5 million a day in profits at the expense of the Ukrainian state. Why would Kiev sign such an unfavorable contract? The answer is simple: corruption.
 
So what does all of this have to do with Donald Trump? First, Manafort has also made millions off Ukraine’s energy insecurity: he worked as a consultant for none other than Dmitry Firtash. None of this is new information that Trump could possibly be unaware of: Manafort’s relationship with Firtash was first exposed in 2011, in a racketeering lawsuit that was later dismissed. Firtash, now in exile in Moscow, is now under indictment in the US. Second, Manafort also helped Firtash channel Russian money into influencing the outcome of the Ukrainian presidential election. During the time he worked with Manafort, Firtash used an $11b loan from bankers closed to Putin to back pro-Russian Yanukovych in his successful 2010 presidential campaign.
 
Manafort and Mermoud are not the only Trump associates who have worked extensively in corrupt industries: Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy advisor, worked closely with Gazprom for many years. To be clear, US politics is not squeaky clean. US campaign finance and lobbying are dirty businesses and are in need of profound restructuring. But Trump’s associates have made their careers working in some of the most corrupt industries in the world: the fact that Manafort has worked in Ukraine’s energy industry and has been involved in the installation of a pro-Russian president in a Ukrainian presidential election means that he has no scruples. The Ukrainian people have been embroiled in violence, revolution and now civil war in an attempt to rid themselves of endemic corruption of the political system, largely without success. The fact that Trump willingly chooses associates that perpetuated this corruption should be far more worrying to the American people than the prospect of a thaw in relations with Moscow.

By Emily Holland and Hadas Aron

In what seems like a new Olympic tradition, scandals over corruption, shoddy construction, and even kangaroos have dominated the headlines in preparation for the 2016 Summer Games. But amongst the usual crimes, Russia’s doping scandal stands out as particularly shameful. Although Russia avoided a blanket ban from the IOC, many Russian athletes, including the entire Track and Field team, will not be allowed to compete in the 2016 Olympic Games. But while the ban represents a huge personal tragedy for the athletes involved, the scandal may in fact be a win-win situation for Moscow.
 

1. Part of the sustaining logic of Putin’s regime is the framing of Russia as a victim against a traitorous and hypocritical West. As we have written before, Putin has defined his regime through a particular type of nationalism that frames him as the protector of the Russian nation while also justifying the curtailing of liberal rights and high levels of corruption. The outcry against the Russian doping scandal supports this narrative. According to the Russian athletics federation president Dmitry Shlyakhtin, “other countries don’t have any fewer problems…but for some reason they’re searching for problems in Russia all the time.” While the International Olympic Committee calls Russia’s actions a “shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport,” Putin views the investigation as a witch-hunt, publically stating, “Today we see a dangerous relapse of politics intruding into sports.” To Russia’s domestic audience, Moscow is sending the message that it is the West, and not the Putin regime, that is responsible for Russia’s failings.
2.  Now that Russia has managed to avoid a blanket ban from participating in the Olympics, Moscow can still use the scandal to its advantage. As our colleague (and advisor!) Kimberly Marten has noted, “Putin’s first major goal is to go down in history as the man who made Russia great again after humiliating setbacks.” If Russian athletes who have been cleared to participate manage to win in the face of Western hypocrisy and oppression their victory is sweeter.  On Wednesday, Russia’s Olympic Team received a heroic send-off from the Kremlin not dissimilar to that of an army heading off to battle. Putin gave a rousing speech, calling the scandal a “targeted campaign” with “no concrete, evidence based accusations”, and even argued that the ban was “open discrimination” that reduced the integrity of competition at the 2016 games. After his speech, two-time Olympic gold medal pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva (now banned from participating) hugged him tearfully, thanking him for his unwavering support and pronounced, “We are one team, we are one big world power. You can do it, we believe in you, don’t let yourself be destabilized, don’t let yourselves be pressured. Walk with your head held high and proud….so that all these pseudo-clean foreign athletes understand they didn’t attack the right people.” 

While Moscow may be able to spin the doping scandal to its advantage, the magnitude of the institutionalized doping ring is not without long-term consequences. In addition to the negative reputational effects internationally, the doping scandal has brought to light just another example of the nature of pervasive corruption in Putin’s Russia. The Russian affair goes beyond even the doping scandal in competitive cycling: the involvement of the FSB and other state agencies show that rather than sport being a corrupt exception to the rule, corruption in Putin’s Russia is the norm.