How Dictators Use Sports to Win Friends and Influence People

Authoritarians are developing new tools to project their malign influence across the globe. The world of sports can teach us a lot about the games they play.

By Sarath K. Ganji

April 2025

Rose and lily centerpieces lit a path across a cream-and-coconut conference table to a bouquet of microphones planted in front of Antonio Panzeri. Dressed in a dark blazer, the Italian politician was flanked on either side by attentive journalists in business suits and thobes. Behind them was a white backdrop bearing the maroon logo of the event’s host: the National Human Rights Committee, Doha-Qatar.

Days earlier, Panzeri had set out for the small Gulf nation on what was billed as a fact-finding trip. His April 2018 visit was well-timed. The emirate was seeking recognition of its migrant-rights reforms, hoping to placate critics of its controversial hosting of the 2022 World Cup. And here was Panzeri, a member of the European Parliament and, as it so happened, chair of its human-rights panel.

The politician made the rounds with local stakeholders, many of them government officials, before sharing his findings at a press conference held at the Committee’s high-rise headquarters. Panzeri’s remarks would prove consequential — then and now.

“We have seen positive developments in the field of human rights,” Panzeri beamed. “We encourage Qatar to continue these reforms.” His digest didn’t stop there, though; he had uncovered a vulnerable group that World Cup critics had apparently overlooked.

“I listened to the statements of those affected by the blockade,” he said of the Qatari nationals hemmed in by a year-old embargo organized by Saudi Arabia. “The blockade policies have negative effects on people.” Citizen suffering, Panzeri seemed to suggest, deserved attention, too — maybe even as much as that of migrant workers.

Before wrapping up, Panzeri committed his panel to two measures: a pact with the Committee to collaborate on shared aims, including “confronting the violations and repercussions of the blockade” and a hearing in Brussels, featuring the Committee’s chair, to spotlight the embargo’s effects on Qatari rights. Within weeks, Panzeri would deliver on both. And a year later, at a conference sprouting from that very pact, he would praise Qatar as a “reference” for human rights.

Panzeri’s pronouncements were a stunning reversal of what many had long assumed: The State of Qatar was a flagrant violator of human rights — of women, LGBTQ persons, and other groups. The emirate’s winning bid to host the 2022 World Cup, however, focused the world’s gaze on its migrant laborers, the millions of construction and hospitality workers responsible for the country’s rapid development. Investigations by the Guardian, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch were among the first to reach beyond the rights community to audiences unfamiliar with the Arabian Gulf’s restrictive guest-worker programs.

I, too, was among the unfamiliar, for a time. Shortly after the Guardian’s report came out in 2013, I trekked to Qatar to survey its labor camps for the alleged abuses that prompted my predecessors to label the emirate a modern slaver. And my conclusions largely confirmed theirs: This World Cup was shaping up to be a human-rights tragedy.

But that was years before Panzeri’s 2018 visit. Maybe things had changed. Maybe Qatar’s raft of reforms, grandly announced but unevenly implemented, had finally taken hold. Maybe the government had scrubbed its laws, updated its practices, and redirected its energies toward protecting its migrant workforce. Had Panzeri and his panel — emblematic of the European Parliament’s liberal-democratic tradition — exposed a double standard in rights protections that the rest of us had missed?

They had not. They were just bribed by the Qataris.

The years-long plot dubbed “Qatargate” is the biggest scandal ever to hit the European Union. For many, Qatargate is an extraordinary story about an ordinary activity: influence peddling. After all, the fate of Qatar’s brand — of its security, even — depended on its successful hosting of the World Cup. So it enlisted European lawmakers in one tranche of its global PR campaign, passing under-the-table payments in exchange for public praise of its tournament preparations and labor-rights record.

That’s a compelling story, but it’s not the whole story. It misses three key components: the lifestyle sector, sports, that Qatar spent years investing in to accrue leverage; the everyday agent, the National Human Rights Committee, which the same state leveraged to hijack a foreign institution, the European Parliament; and the alternative outcome, the shift in focus to citizens’ suffering imposed from outside, that this state promoted through a foreign mouthpiece.

There are a few ways to frame this wider story of influence peddling. One is an economic tale of autocrats navigating the enabling environment of internationalization to infiltrate and manipulate open societies. Another is a legal tale of autocrats mastering the tradecraft of regulatory capture to make agents out of the West’s principal patrons — international institutions like the EU. But the tale I have in mind is a geopolitical one of autocrats prototyping a powerful new toolkit to achieve grand ambitions with limited resources.

And the best way to tell this story is by profiling Qatar’s decade-plus endeavor to host the World Cup: first, because it demonstrates the high visibility and low barriers to entry of the sports sector; second, because it exposes the variety of agents at the emirate’s disposal; third, because it models the toolkit comprising Qatar’s arsenal of influence; and fourth, because it previews the kind of world its leaders are helping to bring about.

Qatar, to be sure, is not the only autocracy to wield these tools. Nor is the sports sector the only one in which autocrats tinker with them. But the Qatari case stands out for what it broadly reveals about the potency of authoritarian influence.

Put another way, if the EU — that venerable pillar of the rules-based order — could be duped by a country the size of Connecticut, is any sovereign really safe from malign foreign influence?

Making It by Faking It

Bill Clinton was hardly amused. Sitting in the cavernous auditorium of FIFA’s Zurich headquarters in late 2010, the former U.S. president wore a smile that radiated surprise more than support, like the glazed-and-gritted looks of many others in attendance. FIFA had just unveiled Qatar as the site of the 2022 World Cup — and its first Middle East host — in a plodding half-hour ceremony.

The emirate had beaten out Australia, Japan, South Korea, and yes, the United States, whose delegation held the row of seats right in front of Qatar’s. So, when its name was announced — its representatives sharing hugs and handshakes, exchanging cheers and even a few tears, on their way to the auditorium stage — the Americans had little time to reel in their stunned reactions. It was left to Clinton, ever the politician, to convey their collective, if tepid, congratulations.

Their reactions were understandable. For close to two years, that vote had been the Americans’ to lose. Only a day earlier, the U.S. delegation had delivered a 40-minute presentation to FIFA executives that included a sleek TV ad, speeches by the actor Morgan Freeman and athlete Landon Donovan, and a video message from then-president Barack Obama. The pitch was so good that, by day’s end, the U.S. bid was the bettor’s pick.

But it was never a sure thing. Back in the United States, Arizona’s controversial immigration law had prompted some to wonder whether the entire country was committed to an inclusive World Cup. Meanwhile, a Michigan lawmaker had introduced a resolution to block federal spending on any mega event until physical education was fully funded across U.S. schools. Perhaps these patches of unpopularity had reached the ears of FIFA’s voters, who were keen to bring soccer’s biggest tournament to a unified nation.

Years later, however, we would learn that not only were those patches immaterial to FIFA’s decision — they were outright fictions. An investigation by the Sunday Times revealed that the Qatari delegation had hired an American PR firm, BLJ Worldwide, to “undermine the 2018/2022 candidacies of competitor countries, particularly Australia and the US.”

Part of that effort was overt, captured in the boilerplate language of BLJ’s contract with the bid committee. But part of it was also covert. Among the dirty tricks its team carried out were the doctored articles catastrophizing the Arizona law and the manufactured resolution prioritizing physical education. But the campaign didn’t end there. With a phalanx of former CIA officers in tow, BLJ’s approach mimicked “traditional intelligence operations,” from recruiting journalists and influencers to circulate smears to concocting everyman blogs spouting unflattering opinions.

This wasn’t the only clandestine campaign that Qatar had set in motion either. As BLJ worked its targets, so too did another U.S. consultancy, Global Risk Advisors (GRA), which partnered with a London-based private eye to surveil members of the U.S. bid team.

Even after Qatar landed the event, it continued to lean on consultancies, redirecting their ops to counter criticisms and critics of its World Cup preparations. GRA built an influencer network to subdue an outspoken FIFA executive; PR standout Portland Communications launched a sports blog to fabricate public discontent with candid commentators; hack-for-hire WhiteInt phished inboxes to pilfer the records of French investigators, activists, and journalists; and marketing firm aRep Global created fake websites and social-media accounts to smear Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

These are just the campaigns we know about.

Schemes like these are known as astroturfing — that is, when underhanded actors who want to mask their interests and intentions disguise their deeds as grassroots advocacy and action. The practice, which gets its name from the artificial material that looks like grass, aims to make what’s synthetic appear organic and what’s top-down seem bottom-up, often by outsourcing the operations to third parties capable of carrying out dirty tricks undetected.

The third parties working to disqualify Qatar’s competitors for hosting the 2022 World Cup were remarkably undistinguished. They were organized as law, lobbying, PR, and consulting firms domiciled in democratic countries like the United States and India that crafted comms strategies, issued press releases, compiled news clippings, and designed glossy spreads.

Yet, if “advisory services” was one use for these third parties, then aggression and discretion, as GRA’s founder put it, was the other. Embedded throughout their teams were former intelligence agents; these included IT and “technical collection specialists” as well as “field operatives.” Stashed within their strategies were covert tactics; these included “patsies,” “lightning rods,” psyops, and “persistent and aggressive distractions and disruptions.” And understood across their campaigns were distance and discretion, enabling assurances of “full deniability” to their Qatari clients.

The very familiarity of these firms hid the depth of their offerings, giving Qatar’s leaders the cover they needed to smile publicly and sabotage privately.

War by Other Means

Fans of Italy’s Serie A football league eagerly awaited the final week of June 2020, when sports networks would once again carry the stars of Italian soccer on a screen near them. But when that moment came, the screens of countless fans worldwide instead beamed a blue emptiness, their broadcasts cut off. It would be a disappointing week in an exceedingly tragic year.

By that time, covid-19 had crept into every crevasse of the planet, killing more than 450,000 people and infecting 8.5 million. Italy, among the hardest hit by the pandemic’s first wave, had shuttered its professional sports leagues months earlier, leaving fans with even fewer escapes as the virus coursed through their closed communities. That’s why Serie A’s return that summer was so widely anticipated before being so unexpectedly blacked out. Soon enough, those viewers would come to learn their cherished pastime had become entangled in a contest between two foreign powers trading blows across any platform available — even the pitch.

The powers in question were Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Once uneasy allies, the two had been bitter rivals since the mid-1990s. Their latest standoff, though, began a few years earlier, when a quartet of Arab countries, led by Riyadh, accused Doha of unsettling the region through its support of Islamist groups. In response, Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with the emirate and halted all land, air, and sea traffic to the peninsula in 2017. The embargo upended daily life across the Gulf. In so doing, it revealed to both countries just how coupled their economies had become, particularly in the wide world of sports.

Image credit: Mairo Cinquetti/NurPhoto via Getty Images

For Qatar, sports had over the years transformed from hobby to side hustle. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s with a batch of regional soccer and auto competitions, then advancing in the 1990s and 2000s with a contingent of international sponsorships, Qatar had by the 2010s assembled an army of positions across the global sports sector. Just take its investments in Italian soccer. The Qatari capital twice hosted Serie A’s midseason tournament, the Supercoppa Italiana. Qatari broadcaster beIN Media (formerly Al Jazeera Sport) beamed Serie A matches to 35 territories worldwide. Qatari flag carrier Qatar Airways even sponsored one of Serie A’s teams, slapping its logo on AS Roma’s jerseys.

These were but a fraction of the emirate’s investments in global sports. By 2017, Qatar had staged nearly three-hundred sporting events with top federations, sealed close to a hundred media and sponsorship deals with big-name soccer brands, and purchased a handful of soccer clubs based in Europe.

These investments left Qatar sitting atop its very own sports empire, which the Saudi-led embargo threatened to topple. First were the media deals. Not long after the blockade went up, a Saudi “pirate TV and streaming” startup mockingly named beoutQ began ripping and rerunning beIN’s content as its own. Though Saudi officials denied any involvement, the pirate operation advanced the kingdom’s cause by plundering beIN’s rights and revenues.

Second were the hosting gigs. A year into the embargo, Saudi officials swiped Italy’s midseason soccer tournament from Qatar, then inked a deal to host Spain’s version of the same. The agreements irked emirate officials, but their more pressing concern was the fate of their empire’s crown jewel: the 2022 World Cup. Reliant as the peninsula was on inputs from abroad, the blockade shook Qatar’s highly publicized plans to deliver shimmering stadiums, chic hotels, and a made-from-scratch metro. It was as if Saudi Arabia was coming after its throne.

But if the kingdom thought these moves were enough to squeeze concessions from Doha, it misread the situation: Qatar had all the leverage it needed to bust the blockade. Remember Qatargate? There, an unassuming NGO, the National Human Rights Committee, got an arm of the EU to hold a public hearing parroting Doha’s criticism of the embargo. It was a subtle display of the sway the emirate held through its financial dealings.

Elsewhere, Qatar’s clout was more pronounced. As the EU operation proceeded, beIN pressured the soccer leagues it did business with to crack down on beoutQ’s bootleg feeds. For Serie A, that threat, first delivered in early 2019, probably sounded like a bluff. It was not. In the throes of covid, beIN blacked out the league’s worldwide broadcasts for a week, resuming coverage only after clawing back a share of its US$500 million media buy. Then, when those rights were up for renewal the following year, the broadcaster unexpectedly opted not to compete.

Serie A had effectively been kicked out of the Middle East.

Such gambits typify the chessboard politics of lawfare. When, for feuding actors, kinetic operations comprising lethal action are out of reach, legal campaigns can sometimes serve the same objective. As the terrain for waging war shifts, so do the implements that combatants take up: Soldiers are swapped out for litigators, rifles for rulebooks, battlefields for boardrooms. Victory, in turn, comes down to gaming rulebooks and shopping boardrooms.

All this, of course, presupposes a world in which the rules matter but the referees charged with enforcing them — international institutions — are pliable. Believing that, lawfaring parties work the refs, hoping to game the planet’s principal enforcers.

Qatar certainly understood the value of pliant referees. Facing an existential threat, it countered the Saudi-led blockade by lobbing an arsenal of law-setting and law-enforcing institutions at the kingdom’s exposed flanks. One of these flanks was the country’s human-rights record. Having framed the embargo’s aims in principled terms, Riyadh could ill afford to have its efforts questioned on moral grounds. So Doha convinced the UN to dispatch a fact-finding team to the region to publicize the embargo’s harmful effects on Qatari rights. Then, it lobbied the European Parliament to acknowledge these effects in a resolution rebuking Saudi Arabia’s poor treatment of women.

Another Saudi flank was its business-friendly reputation. With cross-border investment so critical to the kingdom’s vision for a thriving economy, Riyadh needed foreign companies to see it as open for business. Doha therefore initiated a cascade of intellectual-property cases to spook its rival’s network, filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization alleging multiple violations of the body’s bedrock IP agreement. Meanwhile, beIN submitted a claim with the UN Commission on International Trade Law and the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), citing over $1 billion in damages from Saudi breaches of OIC investment rules.

More shrewdly, both the Qatari government and beIN leaned on their corporate contacts in the sports sector, pressing them to sever ties with their Saudi partners and urging them to grumble to competition authorities including the European Commission and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

If the point of lawfare is to win over the refs, then Qatar managed to get several of the world’s most important ones to blow the whistle on Saudi behavior. Some, like Serie A, ignored it and suffered the repercussions. But others, including the English Premier League, responded — going so far as to reject hundreds of millions in Saudi money, meant for the purchase of a top-tier club, for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions more they stood to gain from beIN.

Eventually, Gulf leaders took notice of the whistles, too. In January 2021, Saudi Arabia declared the embargo over. Proof of the kingdom’s capitulation? During the opening ceremony of the 2022 World Cup, Riyadh’s mercurial ruler donned a Qatar-themed scarf while smiling broadly and clasping hands with Doha’s emir.

Spinning at All Costs

Sunlight was just filtering into the corridors of Zurich’s Baur au Lac hotel when a handful of guests began their walks of shame. One shuffled past a pair of nineteenth-century Parisian Gobelin tapestries on his way to the lobby exit. Another scurried by a fine-wine boutique before slinking into a smoke-grey station wagon. In the space of a couple hours, four more would trace similar paths — all of them targets of a surprise swoop-in by Swiss authorities.

Not until the sun had crept across the Atlantic, peaking through clouds blanketing Brooklyn on that May morning in 2015, would the purpose of the perp walks become known: The U.S. Department of Justice was going after FIFA for its decades-long role in corrupting the beautiful game. What began as a shocking sequence of raids and arrests would, in time, grow into a sprawling investigation fetching more than forty defendants from across the Americas, sparking parallel probes by Australian, Swiss, and French officials, and threatening the very future of FIFA’s prized events. Qatar’s World Cup was in peril.

Criticism of the country’s turn as host was, of course, nothing new. By the time news of the DOJ inquiry broke, the emirate had already weathered concerns over its searing summer temperatures and grim conditions for migrant workers. Although Qatar had dealt with both ably enough, other controversies proved harder to quash.

Beginning in 2014, the emirate was implicated in a series of journalistic investigations notable for troves of leaked files documenting the damning discoveries. One found that Qatar’s top soccer official had paid out millions in bribes to rig the 2022 World Cup vote. Another showed that Qatar’s Parisian soccer club had committed financial fraud to snag the sport’s best athletes. And yet another held that Doha’s development academy had improperly trafficked minors across continents to duck FIFA’s naturalization rules.

The drip-drip of these revelations rippled across world soccer, eventually reaching the banks of Zurich — where FIFA was in retreat. Within a year of the May raids, the body’s embattled leader would resign, its executive committee would be dissolved and its upcoming World Cup vote suspended, and some of its corporate sponsors would bow out.

Much of FIFA’s decay, to be sure, was decades in the making. But for many, Qatar’s winning bid stood out as a symbol of the organization’s rot. Journalists characterized it as “the bid that broke FIFA,” while activists branded it the “World Cup of shame.” So loud was the outcry, and so numerous the concerns, that audiences as wide-ranging as senior FIFA officials, leading Arab states, and the Council of Europe called for a rerun of the vote. Qatar’s emir had once remarked that hosting a World Cup would define his country’s image in the century to come. These stories were doing that — but for all the wrong reasons.

Image credit: Alexander Hassenstein/FIFA via Getty Images

Fortunately for Qatar, it had a ringer. Gianni Infantino, a Swiss-Italian once dubbed the “accidental candidate,” was elected FIFA’s president in early 2016. Having cut his teeth as European soccer’s compliance guy, Infantino offered the beleaguered body a steady hand with which to clear its growing backlog of blemishes. Or so many had thought. As his tenure unfolded, what they got instead was more of the same. Early on, the new administrator committed to keeping FIFA’s upcoming cups in Russia and Qatar. Eventually, he would also abandon or reverse most of the far-reaching reforms the federation had previously announced.

Some of this was to be expected. For a FIFA chief to have done otherwise would have defied the position’s long history. Famously, João Havelange, the body’s pioneering president, had run interference for Argentina’s military junta — beneficiaries of the 1978 World Cup — by downplaying concerns over that regime’s campaign of state terrorism. The event proceeded. The terrorism persisted. Seen in that light, Infantino was simply following his predecessors’ playbook.

But it’s in another light — that of an influencer — that the Swiss-Italian seemed to be working from a different playbook. Where Havelange had schlepped to Argentina a few times in the lead-up to its tournament, Infantino traveled to Qatar many times a year for several years and, in late 2021, he took the unusual step of moving permanently to Doha with his family.

Where Havelange had offered measured support for Argentina’s repressive government, emphasizing its stability, Infantino for years heaped praise on Doha and its integrity. In his now-famous “I feel gay, I feel disabled” speech, he even suggested that Europe could learn a few things from Qatar’s labor reforms.

And where Havelange had leveraged the bright lights of legacy media to upstage Argentina’s detractors, Infantino marshaled social media to crowd out Qatar’s. As the winter tournament neared, the FIFA chief commanded the eyes and ears of hundreds of thousands of followers through his socials, plus hundreds of millions more through FIFA’s.

This whim to spin lies at the heart of reputation-laundering. Government and corporate brands flagged for bad behavior can unsettle image-conscious audiences. These blemished brands, like crime rings, have a perception problem that blocks them from realizing their aims. And so, like crime rings, they turn to laundering, recruiting “plus-ones” to help make what has been sullied seem acceptable. Laundering, then, is just the business end of manipulation.

But while money-launderers are in the business of manipulating money, reputation-launderers are in the business of manipulating information. Their plus-ones aren’t cash-rich partners like car washes; they’re credibility-rich ones like universities. Nor are their payoffs denominated in greenbacks; they’re doled out in favors, in IOUs. In the sports sector, tellingly, the partners and payoffs involved are so established that there’s a name for its variant of reputation-laundering: sportswashing.

Indeed, as proof of Doha’s misdeeds piled up, its leaders didn’t fix them so much as flush them, relying on a contingent of reputation-rich recruits to do so. One set of recruits sprang from the ranks of journalism and academia. These commentators, hip to the newsworthiness of mega events, generated a lot of positive press about Qatar and its World Cup, from the history it was making to the stereotypes it was breaking. Another set of recruits arose from stadium stands and biergarten benches. These spectators, gripped by the energy and emotions bound up in soccer’s top tournament, became the eyes and ears of Qatar’s rebrand, circulating anecdotes about the country’s safety, revelry, and modernity.

The last set of recruits — one of whom we’ve already met — emerged from the sports industry itself. These influencers, brought in by host-nation officials and sponsors, acted as character references on Qatar’s behalf, backing the emirate’s messaging on human rights, economic development, and regional security.

The sum of their sweat, to be sure, was unable to deflect all the criticism that came Qatar’s way. In any context, commentators can displace only so many unsettling stories; spectators can debase only so many unwelcoming emotions; and influencers can discredit only so many unflattering perspectives.

But where its plus-ones fell short, Doha was all too willing to make up the difference. Qatari officials, under cover of the nation’s labile media laws, blocked independent outlets, detained foreign journalists, and jailed local whistleblowers. Meanwhile, tournament organizers, with hopes of packing stadiums, offered foreign fan bases free flights, free rooms, and free tickets. And when that didn’t do the trick, they fudged attendance and capacity figures to make audiences near and far believe otherwise.

It’s here that autocratic apologists tend to roll their eyes, believing these examples to be just as true of democracies. But consider this. As the stains of Qatar’s World Cup controversies set in, where were the companies keen to take action, legislators eager to check executive excesses, ministries ready to patch problems, and local media raring to pester policymakers? The answer is nowhere. If autocracies like Qatar seem to get all the attention for sportswashing, it’s because they’re better at it than democracies. After all, they don’t have to deal with deliberative bodies, independent media, or private enterprises — with the very things that, yes, at times make it difficult for democracies to deliver, but crucially also bring to their attention faults in need of fixing.

So did Qatar’s efforts deliver? Reputation-laundering is perhaps the most difficult of autocratic tactics to finger. Often, the number of image-conscious audiences in play is vast, as is the number of variables shaping their opinions and the number of outcomes those opinions can shape. If no one is keeping track of where a would-be launderer stands in the world’s estimation before and after its information-manipulation campaign, how can anyone — whether activist or apologist — pronounce the effort malign or benign, intentional or accidental?

Maybe, in Qatar’s case, it’s not as complicated as all that. This tale began with Doha unexpectedly winning the right to host the 2022 World Cup, only to find itself at the center of so much controversy as to threaten that very opportunity. Yet not only did Qatar pull off the monthlong competition to widespread acclaim, it delivered a storybook final that drew more than ten times the viewership of the Super Bowl and gave Argentina’s Lionel Messi the last trophy he needed to seal his legacy as soccer’s all-time greatest — none of which actually mattered.

Days before the sure-footed forward hoisted the trophy, Gianni Infantino, Doha’s indefatigable spin doctor, had already ruled on the emirate’s reputation, declaring its tournament “the best ever” World Cup. Through it all, FIFA had survived and Qatar thrived.

Besting the Rules-Based Order

Perhaps sports seem like a silly sector to poke at for signs of malignancy — for clues about how autocratic influence works, infecting the sinews of open societies. Athletic competition, for so many, is about tradition, about community, about escape. It’s certainly not about politics. And yet, it’s that very quality — sports’ anodyne air — that makes the sector so appealing to autocrats and so susceptible to their designs.

It’s not just sports, either. Lifestyle sectors of all kinds, from media and academia to healthcare and higher ed, face this same predicament. These cross-border spaces are teeming with everyday agents: corporations and consultancies, nonprofits and philanthropies, criminal networks and political parties. Some are familiar and benign; others, foreign and malign. To unlock Qatar’s toolkit for snatching and saving its World Cup, then, is to peek inside the frightening but effective playbook that autocrats the world over are using to best the rules-based order.

That playbook begins with the inputs that underwrite foreign influence. Money is leverage, and in today’s permissive global economy, one way illiberal governments accrue that leverage is by sinking vast sums in sectors abroad. The United Arab Emirates boasts regional media ventures with CNN and Sky News and, since 2022, has backed a billion-dollar private-equity play to buy out Western brands such as the Washington Post and the Telegraph. China has doled out billions in contracts to U.S. universities to set up branch campuses like New York University’s in Shanghai and to host Chinese-language programs such as those of the Confucius Institute and its spinoffs. And Hungary has forged close relations with policy institutes in the United States and set up think tanks in Europe.

But in these sectors, as in sports, the buzz surrounding splashy investments often belies just how little we know about them. Such autocratic bets tend to obscure who’s paying for what, making it near impossible to hold anyone — foreign leaders or their plus-ones — accountable when things fall apart.

These investments go by many names: economic statecraft, state capitalism, or geoeconomics among those who consider them business as usual; corrosive capital, malign finance, or strategic corruption among those who view opacity as a perversion of state practice. Whatever the term, their logic all leads to the same worrying place. As globalization shrinks the planet, it enlarges autocracy.

Of course, the world’s economies aren’t without some rules, which is why the autocratic playbook also covers the outputs that propel foreign influence. Interference laws make it hard for noxious governments to meddle directly in the affairs of other countries; hence, the plus-ones. Azerbaijan has recruited Western politicians — sometimes through bribes, other times through lobbyists — to advance its narrative on sham elections. Saudi Arabia has booked consultancies such as McKinsey and BCG to shuttle it around remote capitals, plug it into remote industries, and advise it on remote critics. And Russia has coopted criminal networks across Europe and Africa to augment its capabilities in espionage and assassination.

The plus-ones in these examples are all foreign. Yet in appearance, contracted consultants look like everyday experts just as state-owned enterprises look a lot like everyday companies, government-run NGOs like everyday nonprofits, and dark-money foundations like ordinary philanthropies. Appearances can be deceiving, and here that’s the point. The dual-use duplicity of such agents is what enables them to infiltrate and manipulate open societies on behalf of their illiberal principals.

This duplicity is tough to disentangle, which is probably why so many analysts conflate these cross-border encounters with soft power or diplomacy. Saudi Arabia’s takeover of an English soccer team was labeled a “soft power play”; Azerbaijan’s effort to rig the Council of Europe was dubbed “caviar diplomacy.” But if soft power is premised on thoughtful persuasion and diplomacy on transparent exchange, how can bribing bureaucrats and stalking dissidents be labeled as either? To the contrary, dual-use agents operate far from the frontlines of diplomacy, in the gray zone between routine statecraft and open warfare, where manipulation — sharp power — is the coin of the realm. And as internationalization multiplies these agents, the gray zone widens.

Image credit: Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty Images

This brings us back to Qatargate. Recall how Doha leveraged everyday agents like the National Human Rights Committee to court Antonio Panzeri and others who could help it steer the European Parliament. The arrangement, which lasted from 2018 to 2022, resulted in many favors for the emirate. When a disapproving resolution popped up, it was killed; when a visa-free travel deal hit snags, they were overcome; when an unflattering book appeared onsite, it was removed. Qatargate showcased what the sharp-power toolkit — astroturfing, lawfare, and reputation-laundering — could accomplish.

Once the plot became public, though, liberal Europe was treated to the flipside of those favors. Far-right politicians including France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán used the scandal to mock the EU and minimize, if not justify, their own illiberal misdeeds. Indeed, Qatargate triggered an onrush of Euroskepticism, which has only surged in the years since. As of summer 2024, the new, far-right Patriots for Europe coalition has become the European Parliament’s third-largest bloc and Euroskeptics now comprise a quarter of the chamber.

That’s troubling news for those who favor liberal democracy and believe a Europe whole and free is the world’s last, best hope of defending it in an age of creeping autocracy. It also gets at the last part of the autocratic playbook: the outcomes that result from foreign influence. For not only did Qatargate weaken Europe’s credible defense of the rules-based order, it previewed what a successor to that order might look like.

To begin with, it’s an order built on illiberal norms. Remember how Doha prioritized the suffering of its citizens over its migrant communities? Such a stance follows from a reading of sovereignty that many autocrats embrace, setting aside popular sovereignty and self-determination for state sovereignty and control.

In closed societies, that control comes in many flavors. Control over the internet, for Beijing, is styled as “cyber sovereignty” and normalizes censorship. Control over the household, for Moscow, is messaged as “traditional values” and indulges intolerance. Control over the border, for Ankara, is rendered as “counterterrorism” and permits perpetual emergency. Censorship, intolerance, rule by law — all are a far cry from the norms of free speech, pluralism, and rule of law that mark open societies.

Apart from norms, the successor to the rules-based order is one shaped by insurgent institutions. The BRICS countries, once just an academic label, have evolved into a geopolitical bloc. In 2015, founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa launched their own multilateral bank and, earlier this year, they added Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE to their ranks. Separately, China has convinced communities worldwide to try out its economic scheme — one weary of Bretton Woods and backed by such efforts as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative.

This isn’t to say that autocrats are through with establishment institutions. Qatar, after all, leaned on the UN and the WTO to help break the Saudi-led blockade. However, as non-Western states draw closer together under the umbrella of new international bodies, it’s clear their predecessors have lost their monopoly on multilateral wheeling and dealing.

Finally, this incipient order is parceled into spheres of influence. These are partly rhetorical, as when the Kremlin casts neighboring countries as its “near abroad” or the Chinese Communist Party scolds those who fumble the “Three Ts” of Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen. In world politics, attempts like these at tagging turf are nothing new. Even Saudi Arabia once laid claim to an orbit circling its entire peninsula, only to have satellites like Qatar eventually drift away, seeding subsequent clashes.

Today’s autocratic orbits are not only rhetorical, however. They’re institutional: China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for instance, embeds the Middle Kingdom’s make of sovereignty throughout Central Asia; Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union mirrors the EU in form while serving as its counterweight in substance. Even the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has sometimes helped repress critics of China who are out in ASEAN member states. These rings of regional institutions, braced by illiberal norms and practices, go a long way toward sealing Beijing and Moscow’s spheres of influence.

If, as its name suggests, the rules-based order is based on certain procedures that states commit to following, then the alternative order outlined above — built on illiberal norms, shaped by insurgent institutions, and parceled into spheres of influence — is based on certain results that states hope to bring about and binds its believers to a particular vision of international society. China’s Xi Jinping has styled this vision as a “community of common destiny”; Russia’s Vladimir Putin has described it as the “democratization of international relations.” Both, however disingenuously, suggest something akin to equality among nations.

What Qatargate gave us, then, is a glimpse of what I call the equity-based order: a missionary project favored by autocratic actors to roll back century-old baselines around human rights and state responsibilities in favor of bespoke norms, institutions, and relationships.

It is not entirely clear what the ascendancy of such an order would mean for partisans of the postwar, rules-based order who are committed to open trade and cooperative security, multilateralism and democratic solidarity. Illiberal powers may well accommodate stalwarts of the old order, so long as they — the West — practice their partisanship in their own parts of the world and leave the Rest to theirs. The rise of such an order could also spur Western leaders to redouble their efforts to deliver on liberal democracy’s promises — to balance the prerogatives of liberty and equality in lifting up, rather than leaving behind, communities struggling to keep pace with a shrinking planet.

Then again, if Qatargate has taught us anything, it’s that the world can’t be sliced into separate but equal spaces. Globalization and internationalization make it so that open and closed societies inevitably bump elbows and knock knees, whether by chance or by choice. And when the autocratic playbook is live, it’s open societies that find themselves on the defensive. Ill-suited to manage lifestyle sectors, ill-equipped to wrangle everyday agents, these countries are ill-prepared to compete in the gray zone. At least for now.

And until that changes, the equity-based order will almost certainly be a world made safe for autocracy.

Sarath K. Ganji is a D.C.-based analyst who writes about malign finance and the Middle East. He is Founding Director of the Autocracy and Global Sports Initiative and a 2023 Next Gen National Security Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

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