Major Sporting Events as an Ethical Test: Between Cultural Discovery and the Instrumentalization of Tragedy

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* Dr. Abdellah Chanfar

  Major sporting events are no longer merely occasions for competition or celebration. They have become symbolically charged spaces where culture intersects with politics, ethics with media, and collective memory with transnational representations. Beyond their sporting dimension, they now serve as ethical tests that reveal ways of perceiving the Other—near or distant—and the extent to which shared universal human values are upheld, in moments of joy as well as in moments of suffering.
  The Africa Cup of Nations demonstrated how a sporting event can be transformed, in the eyes of certain participants and observers, into a genuine opportunity for cultural discovery. It revealed a society capable of turning athletic competition into a moment of human encounter between cultures and civilizations, grounded in social solidarity, sincere and non-ostentatious hospitality, and a celebration of life that does not deny its costs. In such moments, culture appears as a living practice and a daily experience—one lived in mountains and oasis communities—something to be experienced rather than narrated, far removed from official discourse or media-produced stereotypes.
  Conversely, the same event exposed another tendency, one less committed to ethical standards, which opted to instrumentalize human tragedy outside its proper context. Images of pain, victims, and darkness were mobilized not for responsible remembrance or serious moral accountability, but as symbolic capital exploited for denunciation, resentment, media sensationalism, or deliberate harm. In this process, victims cease to be subjects worthy of respect and become tools within prefabricated narratives, where human suffering is reduced to consumable material.
  The core paradox here lies not in the plurality of perspectives, but in the divergence of value systems that govern the act of interpretation itself. From a universal ethical standpoint, major events should be understood as opportunities for mutual understanding and bridge-building between cultures. When they are reduced to selective uses of pain and suffering, this reveals a profound rupture between discourse and conscience, between critique and responsibility.
  What is striking is that the lived reality on the ground often remains more coherent than its discursive representations. The host society is able, simultaneously, to celebrate life and to move forward without denying its wounded memory or evading its duty of solidarity with those affected. The divergence lies less in the nature of the event than in the intentions of those producing its narratives.
  This issue extends far beyond the realm of sport and touches upon the very structure of how crises are thought and managed. Certain actors—whether individuals or groups—do not merely coexist with crises; they reproduce and recycle them symbolically and discursively, consciously or unconsciously. This occurs when crisis becomes a habitual mental state, a source of moral legitimacy, or a central element in identity construction, sometimes at the expense of stigmatizing other peoples and nations.
  Several factors contribute to this dynamic, including fear of change and the revision of assumptions, the absence of rigorous critical thinking in favor of emotional interpretation and generalization, and the symbolic or material benefits that may arise from the persistence of crisis. Under such conditions, the objective is no longer to dismantle the causes of suffering, but to manage its permanent presence in collective consciousness.
  The endurance of crises, therefore, is not solely the result of objective complexity, but also of the complexity of the mindsets that confront them, and their inability to shift from a logic of exploitation to one of understanding, from accusatory discourse to the horizon of solutions.
  In this regard, a general principle applies equally to politics and sports: when competence gives way to non-objective considerations, and responsible criticism is replaced by gratuitous accusation, institutions become fragile and values are emptied of meaning. Criticism that refuses the responsibility of proposing alternatives and ignores contextual complexity does not illuminate the public sphere; it deepens its disorientation.
  Ultimately, adherence to universal ethical standards requires that major sporting events be approached as moments of understanding and rapprochement, not as platforms for recycling tragedy. Respect for human dignity, in both joy and suffering, remains the ultimate measure of discursive credibility, ethical awareness, and moral integrity.

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