‘If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad’: Liberal enjoyment and complicity in popular culture

Abstract Global mega-events like the Olympics, World Cup, and Eurovision Song Contest routinely enable and provide cover for extreme violence and suffering, including displacement, environmental destruction, war, and genocide, but the number of people who watch these events has never been higher. This article examines how people navigate the consumption of popular culture they know to be complicit in harm but nonetheless enjoy. The limited attention international relations has paid to the mechanics of complicity has primarily focused on the conditions that coerce people into complicity under oppressive or capitalist societies. It has overlooked the ways we willingly engage with popular culture we know implicates us in harm, not because we are coerced, but because we enjoy it. Introducing focus group data with Eurovision fans, I argue that the liberal enjoyment cultivated at international mega-events entices fans to ignore the violent politics these events are inexorably implicated in as contests between states. In an environment designed to keep people watching, fans wrestle with whether to set their politics aside, find compromises between enjoyment and political conviction, or forgo enjoyment altogether. Their choices reveal how enjoyment drives complicity in relation to popular culture that we do not always (want to) recognize as enabling harm.