Episode 2491: Inside Qatar, Revealing Ronaldo, Covering The Cup
In the 1940s the capital of Qatar, Doha, was a small port town with a population of around 15,000. Today there are approx 2.3 million people living there, making up the majority of Qatar’s population of 2.9 million. Around 1 million of them are migrant workers from South Asia, many of who have been building stadiums for the World Cup, while there are only 300,000 Qatari citizens.
With three days to go before the tournament starts we speak to anthropologist John McManus whose new book, Inside Qatar, offers an insightful portrait of the host nation. This racialised hierarchy, McManus argues, is a modern version of the British Empire’s “ethnic division” of labour.
We also discuss Ronaldo’s revealing interview, Danish TV’s encounter with the local Qatari authorities and we address a listener’s concerns about covering the World Cup given their human rights record and the number of migrant worker deaths in Qatar since the stadium builds began.
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