Many are turning down the sporting event starting this weekend and deciding not to attend or broadcast or watch the games. While often presented as an individual choice not to consume, the boycott is also a collective action.
In recent months, the boycott of the World Cup in Qatar has gained ground. In France, several mayors have announced that their city will not broadcast the event on big screens as usual. Several personalities assure that they will not attend or follow the event. Journalists invite athletes and politicians to take a stand. And in bars and restaurants, fans are discussing whether to do away with the fun of watching the games.
In the book Sociology of Consumption, Ana Perrin-Heredia and I trace the many connections between consumption and politics.
The boycott is one of these possible links.
In rural Ireland in the late 19th century, Charles C. Boycott, a manager employed by a wealthy landowner, disproportionately raised the rents of the farmers attached to his land. This led to the expulsion of the peasants, already weakened by the famine.
An Irish nationalist leader then proposed to the affected families and, more generally, to all residents of these regions (traders, workers, etc.) to ban CC Boycott, i.e. to reject all day-to-day contact with him. The proposal was then extended to all owners who increased their rents and to the peasants who took over the lands of the expellees. A journalist of the time coined the term boycott and turned this family name into a noun to denote these ways of acting.
While the term is most commonly used today to refer to a refusal to do business with a company, not all boycotts refer to commercial products. For example, in 1936 there was a huge campaign to boycott the Berlin Olympics in several countries because of the Nazi regime coming to power.
More recently, a boycott campaign called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) was launched at the request of Palestinian intellectuals and academics. Since 2005, this initiative has called for an economic, academic, cultural and political boycott of the State of Israel in protest against the colonization and occupation of Palestinian land.
Today, it is the World Cup in Qatar that is the subject of boycott calls for myriad reasons, including environmental and social reasons (for example, the number of workers who were exploited and murdered to build the stadiums).
One of the most famous boycotts in history was the 1955 boycott against transportation services provided by the Montgomery Bus Company of Alabama.
One December afternoon, an African-American seamstress named Rosa Parks sat in the front of a bus in one of the seats reserved for “white” passengers. She was imprisoned for “disturbing public order”, which became the starting point of a movement that lasted more than a year.
Black passengers stopped using the company’s services, encouraged by an association founded by a pastor, Martin Luther King. Other users didn’t use it either, out of solidarity or fear. Private vehicles became widely used as taxis and the activists resisted.
Thirteen months later, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated buses violated the U.S. Constitution. The boycott of a trucking service was therefore an important step in a wider political mobilization, such as that of the civil rights movement in the United States, suggesting that a consumer protest may help carry the claims beyond the service in question.
In 1995, the NGO Greenpeace launched an international boycott against the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell. The problem was that the company was planning to sink a storage platform in the North Sea with several thousand tons of oil on board. While British activists did their best to be heard, the German members of the association took various actions, including a boycott of Shell petrol stations.
In Germany, the boycott was so successful that Shell decided to bring its platform to the mainland and decommission it. In this case too, the boycott of a consumer product (in this case fuel), across national borders, made it possible to influence the economic balance of power and to make environmental demands prevail.
In the 2000s, the French company Danone considered closing several biscuit factories, which were considered less profitable than its other businesses, which affected its stock market value. When the factory closures were announced, several actions were taken at the initiative of unions and workers. A widely publicized call for a boycott was launched among them, supported by several political figures.
Despite the media success of this mobilization, Danone did not budge. Although the demands of the mobilized consumers were unsuccessful this time, the boycott contributed to permanent damage to the company’s brand image and to legitimizing the fight against layoffs in the stock markets, a battle that has since gained legitimacy in the political arena. debate.
What can we learn from these boycotts? The first thing that strikes the researchers Ingrid Nyström and Patricia Vendramin is the diversity of the actors involved: trade unions, politicians, NGOs, lawyers, representatives of the state, but also ordinary citizens.
We must therefore be careful not to link (non-)consumer practices to individual consumer choices. Another lesson is that these mobilizations should not be described as new or alternative. In many cases, they rely on old repertoires (scandal, media coverage, persecution, etc.) and political institutions (politicians, established associations, etc.).
It is also important not to reduce the success or failure of a boycott to the realization of a concrete demand. Let us not forget that the boycott of Danone is part of the legitimization of a political action against layoffs in general, thus fueling the idea that the benefits that MNC shareholders receive when employees go into crisis are illegitimate.
Finally, one could add that boycotts should not be too easily associated with progressive and/or environmental causes, as evidenced by the boycott of Nike in 2018 by many American consumers who were angry because the brand chose the footballer as its image. , the man who first knelt during the national anthem in support of the fight against police brutality and discrimination against African Americans.
While committed consumption is a genuine mechanism of political action, these approaches remain unequal. Statistically, the use of the boycott in Europe is much more common in Northern and Western Europe and much less common in Southern and Eastern Europe.
Likewise, and unsurprisingly, this type of movement has spread more among the service sector middle class with higher levels of education.
But there are notable exceptions, such as South Africa against apartheid or India against British colonialism. And boycotts are becoming more common in the so-called southern countries. In Morocco, for example, the 2018 mobilizations “against the high cost of living” targeting the mineral water of Sidi Ali, the milk of Centrale Danone and the gas stations of Afriquia were particularly popular.
But let’s go back to the calls for a boycott of the upcoming World Cup. It is important not to conclude that the protest movement has failed because no delegation has given up sending its national team.
There are many forms of boycott (refusing to show interest, not going to games, not watching games, not buying items such as national team jerseys, etc.), and much criticism has been made about the implications of holding the event in Qatar. which have gradually gained in legitimacy. The boycott is only the first step.
This article was published in ‘The conversation‘.
Source: La Verdad
I am Shawn Partain, a journalist and content creator working for the Today Times Live. I specialize in sports journalism, writing articles that cover major sporting events and news stories. With a passion for storytelling and an eye for detail, I strive to be accurate and insightful in my work.
