Securing the Olympic Games: Exemplifications of Global Governance

Abstract

The Olympic Games are political, national, and consumer spectacles that, as contributions to this volume amply demonstrate, continue to be critically examined from a wide variety of perspectives in relation to a wide variety of topics. In the recent decade the Olympics have also become conspicuous security spectacles characterised by overt displays of military personnel and hardware, sophisticated new surveillance technologies, and rapidly escalating budgets.¹ Initiated by the siege and subsequent killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games and later accelerated by the detonation of a pipe bomb at Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics, this securitisation process reached a categorically different level of intensity after September 11, 2001 to the extent that authorities and critics alike routinely describe the Games as the world’s largest security operations outside of war. September 11 (hereafter 9/11) did not cause this intensification so much as it acted as a tipping point for concerns about what was already being articulated as ‘the new terrorism’ to describe the combination of religious and/or political extremism, unorthodox methods and penchant for theatricality that was already coalescing around the Games and other high-profile events.² Further reinforced by the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the 2005 London Underground bombings, concerns that the global profile of the Olympics provide an ideal platform for a catastrophic terrorist attack now figure prominently in the bidding, staging and wider public discourse surrounding the Games.³