Olympic Games, Mega-events and Civil Societies : Globalization, Environment, Resistance

This volume explores sports mega-events, their social, political, and cultural characters, the value systems that they inscribe and draw on, the claims they make on us and the claims the organisers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create, and the responses of civil societies to them. Our premise is that sports mega-events are not simply sporting or cultural phenomena. They are also political and economic events, characterised by the generation and projection of symbolic meanings -- most obviously over the nature of statehood, economic power, and of collective cultural identity -- and by social conflict, especially over land use, and over the extent and contours of public spending commitments. Because of their peculiar spatial and temporal organization, they raise questions about the relationships between global cultural and economic flows and particular local and national spaces. Because of their evolutionary characteristics, they ask us to consider not simply the time of the event but of the effects of the event on the long-term direction, implementation, and consequences of public policy.

GRAEME HAYES Senior Lecturer and Director of French Studies at Aston University, UK. He has previously published Environmental Protest and the State in France. JOHN KARAMICHAS Lecturer in Sociology at Queen's University, Belfast, UK. He has recently published articles on environmental politics and policy in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, South European Society and Politics, European Environment, Human Ecology Review, and Environmental Politics.