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The world’s best soccer players will go to Qatar to play the world’s game, but for now, Qatar is where slaves go to die. Worker fatalities are so staggering that activists are considering the unthinkable: giving up Coca Cola, along with other indispensable products that sponsor the games. But while there may be worse responses to human rights violations than boycotts, there may be more effective responses too.

The worst response, seemingly, is also the most common: “Let the games begin!” It’s a response that might give human rights abusers the brand boost that every bidder looks for. But human rights abuse defies the maxim that all publicity is good publicity, and not even dictatorships can enforce good publicity overseas. Qatar gave that its best shot last week when it jailed BBC journalists: it wanted to keep them from talking about its human rights violations, and now people are talking about its civil liberties violations.

Still, it can feel better to fight abuse ineffectively than to accept its existence meekly. That may partially explain the existence of the boycott, since its execution is always risky and its benefits often fleeting. A critical mass probably won’t follow a boycott (which, in addition to being disappointing, is counter-productive), and a boycott of one event always follows another boycott of another event, which follows another, which follows a string of others, each triggering only sporadic tremors in the larger geography of human rights but rarely seismic shifts. When Jimmy Carter tried to embarrass Russia by leading an Olympic boycott, he was embarrassed to find that no one was behind him; more successful boycotts typically affect only one kind of abuse in one place. So even if a boycott of Qatar’s World Cup is fortunate enough to attract a crowd, it probably won’t highlight more prevalent abuses there or prevent similar abuses somewhere else.