Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens.
To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition
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Qatar's Soccer Stars Are Guinea Pigs in an Experiment to Erode Citizenship Rights - 0 views
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this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.
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that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation
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At the heart of the regime’s responses to these pressures is the “National Dialogue.” The Dialogue, which kicked off last May, is a vaguely conceived multi-track forum in which a host of carefully selected political figures and experts convene periodically to discuss public policy reforms. The political leadership has marketed this initiative to its international and domestic detractors as a testament to its readiness to engage opponents and alternative viewpoints. In reality, the Dialogue is the regime’s attempt at gaslighting critics
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the spectacle (as opposed to the outcome) of deliberation is the clear driver of this initiative
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by early 2023, the regime had decimated the resources it now needed to erect a convincing façade of participatory politics to mitigate the concerns of its international partners and to absorb popular discontent
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