Balancing local and global security leitmotifs: Counter-terrorism and the spectacle of sporting mega-events

This article considers the transferability of sporting mega-event strategies across time and place. In doing so, it presents a number of arguments highlighting the progressive global standardization of sporting mega-event counter-terrorism strategies comprising continually reproduced security leitmotifs. Such orthodoxies are drawn from a range of experiences at both sporting and non-sporting mega-events. By contrast to these globalized models, the terrorist threats they seek to counter are almost always rooted in diverse local settings. This convergence of sporting mega-event counter-terrorism strategies does not simply represent an uncritical imposition of an external framework of security, however. Instead, this article identifies and interrogates how sporting mega-event security planning is also tempered by a range of localized processes, including vernacular cultures of security and the scale of extant security infrastructures.