Routledge Handbook of Sport for Development and Peace

Holly Collison, Simon C. Darnell, Richard Giulianotti, P. David Howe, Holly Collison, Simon C. Darnell, Richard Giulianotti, P. David Howe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315455150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Sport and physical activity are now regularly used to promote social and economic development, peacebuilding and conflict resolution, on an international scale. The emergence of the 'Sport for Development and Peace' (SDP) sector, comprised of governments, NGOs, sport organizations and others, reveals a high level of institutionalization of this activity, while SDP now constitutes an important element of the scholarly analysis of sport.

This volume analyses and critically discusses the central elements of, and research issues within, the field of SDP and also provides a series of case studies (substantive and geographic) of key research. It is the most holistic and far-reaching text published on this topic to date. Featuring multidisciplinary perspectives from world-leading researchers and practitioners from around the world, the book covers a wide range of topics, including SDP structures, policies and funding streams, how SDP relates to human rights, social exclusion and corporate social responsibility, SDP and gender, SDP and disability, SDP and health, SDP and homelessness, and SDP and the environment.

The Handbook of Sport for Development and Peace is a vital resource for researchers, students and educators in the fields of sports studies, physical education, sport for development and peace, sport-based youth development, sport and politics, sociology of sport, and sport policy.

Part I

The SDP sector

1

The history of SDP

Rob Millington and Bruce Kidd

Introduction

Sport for development and peace (SDP) has been referred to as a ‘new’ social movement that has emerged as a strategy for realizing broad developmental objectives in the last three decades (Kidd 2008). Most of the articles in this Handbook place SDP in this period. Yet throughout recorded history, sport and physical activity (and their earlier variants) have regularly been associated with notions of promoting ‘social good’. In classical Greek societies, athletics, and gymnastics (the antecedents to sport and physical education today¹) were understood to offer an avenue to both personal and societal transformation. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Glaucon reflect on the importance of gymnastic training for guardians of the city, and compare the similarities between athlete and soldier. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses athletics as an avenue for the maintenance of strength and self-worth in the absence of war, writing, ‘a courageous action in war is pleasant, it is concealed in the same way that the pleasure of honour and victory felt by a boxer endures to obtain that honour’ (cited in Giulianotti and Armstrong 2011: 380). The parallels drawn here between athlete and soldier, between athletics and war, were not unique to the philosophers of antiquity. Indeed, in many societies, both competitive and non-competitive forms of physical activity have been popularly associated with military prowess in the interests of promoting social good, however defined, from the celebrated mesomorphic bodies of gods, soldiers, and athletes in classical Greece and Rome to the use of sport in British imperialist expansion (Park 2007a; 2007b). In the twenty-first century, notions of ‘sport for good’, by which we mean sport initiated, organized and played for social purpose,² remain steadfast, underpinned by similar ‘common-sense’ understandings of sport’s seemingly innate ability to spur social transformation.

Despite this history, it is only recently that sport has been institutionalized within the international development sector. Once seen by the development community as an indulgence, or even a distraction from more pressing matters (Holden 2008), sport is now directly connected to the achievement of major development policies, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nation’s (UN) primary development mandate through 2030 (United Nations n.d.). Sport’s rise within the development paradigm is visible in many spheres, from governmental agencies to non-governmental organizations, to corporate social responsibility endeavors. In the public sphere, government agencies have advocated for – and initiated – sport for development programs. Germany, for instance, has a governmental program dedicated to Sport for Development (see Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development n.d.), while the Government of Canada has listed sport for development as one of the five objectives of the current Canadian Sport Policy, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has made five recommendations as to how sport can be utilized in meeting the aims of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015; Government of Canada 2016). Outside the global North, Ghana has been an advocate of SDP throughout the African Union, and Cuba has used sport and physical activity programs to promote development both at home and abroad (Huish, Carter and Darnell 2013). International sporting federations such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fédération International de Football Association (FIFA) have also developed their own SDP programs, and sport mega-events like the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup are increasingly connected to development strategies for host nations in the global South. Non-governmental organizations such as the Kenya-based Mathare Youth Sport Association and the Canadian-based Right to Play have made sustained interventions, while corporate social responsibility endeavors, like Nike’s Girl Effect, are increasingly popular and commonplace. The UN has also been an ardent advocate for SDP since the early 2000s, in not only connecting sport to development policies including the Millennium Development goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but also in creating the UN Office on Sport for Development and Peace (operational from 2001–2017), the position of Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on Sport for Development (currently Wilfried Lemke), and in naming 2005 as the International Year for Sport and Physical Education.

This chapter discusses the emergence and growth of SDP within this trajectory. It begins by placing SDP in the longer history of ‘sport for good’ so as to feature the ideological and programmatic antecedents of SDP today. It then briefly discusses the early internationalization of ‘sport for good’ through nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonialism and imperialism, its incorporation in human rights discourses via the United Nations in the second half of the twentieth century, and the global spread of non-governmental organizations and social movements employing sport in the twenty-first century. The chapter then turns to the emergence of SDP in the early 1990s, identifying the features that distinguish it from earlier forms of ‘sport for good’ and the social and political conditions that enabled its growth and influence. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political and social issues facing SDP today, and offers some pressing questions for future avenues of research.

History of ‘sport for good’

SDP is the most recent expression of the long tradition of ‘sport for good’ that has shaped modern sports from their beginnings in the early nineteenth century. In fact, for most of the modern period, it was taken for granted that sport should be conducted for social purpose, especially individual and community development and improvement. Yet as older forms of ‘sport for good’ were marginalized by the late twentieth-century triumph of global capitalist sport (i.e. sport for commodity production, which developed sport for careers through professional sport) and ‘sport for sport’s sake’ (i.e. sport for winning and ‘bragging rights’), SDP has taken on a distinct identity with the renewal of ‘sport for good’ focused on the global South. We argue therefore that sport for development is not a new social movement per se, as much as a rather familiar expression of the ambition of ‘sport for good’. This section traces the history of ‘sport for good’ from the idea of sport for education and nation-building that emerged from the game-playing curriculum of the nineteenth-century British public school through the age of imperialism and its use of sport as a colonizing tool, to the role of ‘sport for good’ in human rights movements in the second half of the twentieth century to SDP today.

Early examples: sport, character building, and colonialism

In their work on sport, militarism, and peacekeeping, Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong (2011) detail three phases that demarcate sport’s historical ties to social transformation and social good: ‘colonialism and civilization’ spanning from the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; ‘nationalism, ideology and armed conflict’ from the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first century; and contemporary SDP. In the first phase, sport was a key element in empire building and colonial expansion, particularly in Britain. The formative institution was the all-male, upper-class British ‘public’ school, where a succession of progressive headmasters transformed the once delinquent, rough-and-ready culture of game-playing, in the context of the early industrial revolution and rapid urbanization, into an approved curriculum of moral and leadership development organized around sports. Those reforms simultaneously provided the structure for modern sports. The Christian socialist Thomas Hughes dramatized the educational power of sport in his best-selling Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and despite contemporary critics and satirists, who lampooned it as ‘muscular Christianity’, Hughes succeeded in legitimating sports as a force for education and social benefit throughout the globe. Hughes’ joyous vision of sport as character- and nation-building influenced youth leaders, policy-makers and parents everywhere and can still be heard in athletic banquets and SDP fund-raisers to this day (MacAloon 2008).

The reality, though, was more complex. While many boys enjoyed rewarding experiences from sport, such as gaining habits of mind, confidence and friendship networks that stood them in good stead throughout their lives, others were damaged and embittered by the experience. Then, as now, the nature of opportunities varied widely and affected different boys in strikingly different ways. Moreover, despite the promotion of the now familiar values of a ‘level playing field’ and fair play for all, there was a decidedly upper-class and masculine bias to early modern sport. Few opportunities were extended to working-class boys and men – none for girls and women – and where they were, under the banner of ‘rational recreation’, it was as much a form of social control as humanitarian outreach. Sport for the ‘lower classes’ stressed ‘civilized’ behavior as an alternative to drinking, gambling, and idleness, and promoted self-improvement and the values of rationality, industry, purpose, and respectability (Donnelly 2011).

Yet the ideals of ‘sport for good’ were taken up by a wide array of organizations, including state schools, playgrounds, amateur sports clubs, and secular and faith-based youth groups such as the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and the Young Hebrew Association. These quickly spread to other countries through emulation, trade, emigration, and imperialism. With the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, for example, middle-class nationalists transformed the sports introduced by the British garrisons into a vehicle for citizenship education and Canadian nation-building (Kidd 2011). Such was the appeal that even those excluded groups who were forced to create their own opportunities and organizations to enjoy sport at all – in western societies this meant the organized working classes, girls and women, immigrants and Indigenous peoples – developed a strong sense of social purpose (Kidd 2006).

The belief in the moral and civilizing force of sport readily lent itself to the tasks of Empire in what is now the global South, in a way that eerily prefigures SDP today (Donnelly 2011; Donnelly et al. 2011). In both Britain and the United States, sport and physical education were seen as avenues to train soldiers for domestic and international policing. Physical education transformed colleges into ‘theaters of organized physical combat’, instilling enlightened cultural values within the nation and abroad (Park 2007b: 1641). The new codes of imperialist manliness – physical courage, strength, endurance, sportsmanship, and patriotism – were expanded in romanticized visions of the soldier, the pioneer, and the athlete in the colonial ‘frontier’ (Allen 2011).

Soldiers, missionaries, and educators played a prominent role in promoting the ideals of sport and social good, deploying them in the colonial milieu through what J. A. Mangan (2006) has called ‘missionary muscularity’. These men, Mangan (2006: 780) argues, stood as ‘striking testimony to the power of the uplifted Christ to draw to himself … all that is noblest in strength and finest in culture’. Through sport, Empire and Christian mission were thus inextricably linked, in not only training of soldiers and missionaries, but also as a means of social control and cultural imperialism (Hokkanen and Mangan 2006). Teaching colonial subjects sports such as cricket was seen as part of the larger project of leading ‘barbarous’ nations and peoples along a teleological path to modernity and civilization that framed the colonizer as the possessor of knowledge to be benevolently bestowed upon the colonizers and in ways that justified colonial rule (Hokkanen and Mangan 2006). Near the end of the nineteenth century, more than 10,000 British missionaries had been sent overseas at the cost of two million pounds annually, a sum equal to the entire annual cost of British civil service salaries (Giulianotti and Armstrong 2011). Australia and Canada, white settler countries within the Empire, increasingly did the same. The British Empire was thus in part an enormous sports complex, driven institutionally by the military and the church; ‘sport travelled the world with the bullet and the bible’ (Hokkanen and Mangan 2006: 382).

Sport, human rights, and self-determination

To be sure, not all those on the receiving end accepted these efforts with deference. Within many colonized countries the enlightenment values of liberalism instilled through sport (i.e. rationality, free thought, equality) were turned toward anti-colonial purposes (Gidwani 2008). In t...