Contested Worlds and a New Order After the End of the Cold War: The Scramble for Mega Sporting Event Hosting Rights as a Visualization of the New Balance of Power

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Earth Science / Geography - Geopolitics, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen, language: English, abstract: This case study addresses to the task of visualizing and describing the shifts in global politics by comparing two time periods: the Cold War and the era after the end of the Cold War. The entirely new approach uses the awarding of mega sporting events hosting rights as an allegory for the political importance of a country. The more organizations a country is selected for, the more powerful is the relative voice on global level of politics. The most substantial argument in favour of this simplifying method is constituted in the easy and prompt access to the data due to visualizing maps. Moreover, classifying results of several countries, made by Peter Vujakovic in 2005, will be compared to the interpretation of the results of this case study. With the help of this comprehensible approach one can see the topic from a different angle, and it helps to forecast the prospective development of global proportion of power. As a base, the literature research deals with an analysis of the world order during the Cold War and the shifts after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The illustration of the meaning and the background of mega sporting events completes the theoretical part.