ABSTRACT
In 2014 Brazil hosted a football World Cup for the second time. What was supposed to be a beacon for Brazil’s national development and pride became entirely something else. In June 2013, during the FIFA Confederations Cup, the test event for the FIFA World Cup of the next year, the country was engulfed by a series of street demonstrations and riots that would last up until 2014. The great celebration of football, probably the most famous Brazilian national symbol, became what has been called Demonstrations Cup, English for Copa das Manifestações. In the streets of Brazilian cities, the realization of FIFA’s most prominent mega-event clashed with active resistance movements in a series of conflicting encounters deeply marked by violence and authoritarianism. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze this clash from a sociospatial perspective. Its main argument is that the realization of the World Cup intensified an already existing scenario of violation of fundamental constitutional rights by the Brazilian State. This intensification is due to how the host cities were fixed as spaces of consumerism to properly fit the interests and imperatives of the hegemonic complex that organizes the World Cup. Mega-sporting events are global forces with a high capacity to commodify everything around it, including itself and the places that host them. This imperative clashes with the constitutional obligation of Brazilian State to defend its cities as space of citizenship. The antagonism between these two ideas – consumerism and citizenship – is at the heart of the clash between the official FIFA mega-events and the Copa das Manifestações.
