The high profile of sport-for-development programs in the early twenty-first century, emphasized by the support of the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee, and corporate social responsibility, has suggested that such initiatives are a relatively recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, the use of sport to achieve social, economic, and moral endsāāsport-for-goodāāhas a long history. From the colonial period to the current neoliberal era, sport and physical activity have been used as a development tool both because sport is so frequently positioned as apolitical and non-threatening and because it is understood to have universal, transnational, and transhistorical meanings. This book considers the historical context in which sport has been organized and deployed as a means of development, by examining the intersections between the history of sport and the history of development. This chapter sketches out the landscape of contemporary sport-for-development scholarship and outlines the ways in which this argument is pursued in the chapters that follow.
The significance and profile of what is commonly referred to as sport-for-development reached new heights in August 2013 when the United Nations proclaimed April 6 to be the annual āInternational Day of Sport for Development and Peace.ā At the time, it was noted that for the international community āthe adoption of this day signifies the increasing recognition by the United Nations of the positive influence that sport can have on the advancement of human rights, and social and economic development.ā1
The announcement was one in a series of events in the early twenty-first century that contributed to the institutionalization of the notion and practice of sport-for-development on a global scale. Others included the establishment in 2003 of the International Platform on Sport and Development (sportanddev.āorg), the creation in 2005 of FIFAās āFootball for Hopeā initiative,2 and the efforts of the Sport for Development and Peace International Working Group, which published a series of policy documents such as āHarnessing the Power of Sport for Development and Peace: Recommendations to Governmentā in 2008.
This book argues that these important milestones constitute but another chapter in the long narrative of sport-for-development whose arc extends back to the nineteenth century.
The programs, policies, and practices that fall under this banner of sport-for-development today aim to organize and mobilize sport and physical activity in order to contribute to gender empowerment, health promotion, economic development, and peace and conflict resolution, among other goals. Such activity tends to take place in the global South or so-called developing countries (though this is not always the case) and also tends (with important exceptions) to follow the traditional vectors of international development whereby funding and expertise flow from the relatively rich (and almost exclusively White) to the relatively poor (and almost entirely non-White).
Sport-for-development efforts are also tied together by several conceptual or ideological threads: they tend to promote a universal and positive notion of sport and its social and political characteristics (what are often referred to as the social or moral benefits of sport); they encourage stakeholders (both governmental and non-governmental) to deploy sport in the service of development and support other organizations to do the same; and they position sport as a relatively non-threatening and depoliticized means, or even tool, of pursuing development and peace, particularly in regions and contexts where such efforts have been difficult and where violence and poverty have proved intractable.
This book takes the current popularity and institutionalization of sport-for-development as an opportunity to revisit the histories of sport and international development and consider their intersecting narratives. It is concerned with the historical context in which sport has been organized and deployed as a means of social development, particularly on an international scale, and how this history has shaped and led to the current conjuncture in which sport-for-development has been institutionalized. The central argument is that the contemporary notion that sport can make a positive contribution to social development is not new but in fact has a long history. At various stages, and for various reasons, social and political actors have argued for the social benefits of sport and attempted to mobilize sport to such ends but have often done so in ways that stemmed from, reproduced, and therefore largely served particular social and political interests, agendas, or worldviews. The broad brushstrokes of this argument may be familiar to students and scholars of sport history and the history of development, but the recent institutionalization and current popularity of sport-for-development, and the emergence of the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) sector, renew the importance of such lines of inquiry.
Sport-for-development was not just the result of a political vision for the integration of sport and development but was also a site and means for a range of policymakers and sport advocates to test this vision. Such social engineeringāthrough sportāis neither new nor unique to Northern interventions in the South. Consider the example of Midnight Basketball. Born amid increasing concerns about urban poverty and crime in the US in the 1980s, Midnight Basketball programs saw basketball games organized in inner cities with the goal of keeping young men occupied while ostensibly instilling positive values and skills. Games began after 10 p.m., involved 17- to 21-year-old players, and were also attended and monitored by at least two local police officers. Midnight Basketball was an example of American interest and investment in sport-for-development (although was not framed using this term) in the late twentieth century with a domestic focus and was, as Robert Pitter and David Andrews argue, part of a larger and emerging āsocial problems industryā that positioned sport as a means of social intervention generally and crime prevention specifically.3
Not only did it reflect the neoliberal policies of the time, Midnight Basketball helped to legitimize them, offering an attractive and accessible structure to support the broader political shift away from state service provision and toward private agency, social control, and incarceration. As Douglas Hartmann argues, Midnight Basketball emerged within a political climate in the US that was supportive of, and amenable to, neoliberalism amid concerns of inner-city crime and the perceived threats posed by young Black men.4 The ways in which basketball was understood to be popular in American Black culture (and even ānaturalā for Black men) dovetailed both politically and socially with broader fears around Black masculinity and crime. At its root, Hartmann concludes, Midnight Basketball may have been more significant in assuaging (White) fears of presumed Black deviance than it was for improving the life chances of the urban poor in the US.5
Race and racism were central to Midnight Basketball. But the intervention also helped to legitimize a particular vision of neoliberal social policy through sport. In this way, Midnight Basketball was exemplary of sport-for-development and its basic tenets, contexts, and ideologies. The difference was that it focused on the poor and underserved within the borders of the US, rather than organizing and exporting such programs to other countries. From an American perspective, Midnight Basketball saw familiar ideologies and politics playing out in domestic, rather than international contexts. In the tradition of modernization theory (see Chap. 4), notions of sport and social development āat homeā could subsequently be deployed elsewhere.6 There may not have been a direct through-line from Midnight Basketball to the emerging global SDP sector, but they inhabited the same conceptual and historical frame.
Describing the ābeneficiariesā of such efforts requires some historical specificityāeven if suggesting some of them have been acted upon risks undermining their agency. Myriad labels have been invoked over time to describe the ātargetsā of development: the poor and impoverished; developing nations; underdeveloped, underserved, and under-resourced; the Third World; and the global South. The text that follows tries as best as possible to employ these terms in their historical context, reflecting the era in which they were in common (if not unproblematic) usage and the argot of contemporary actors. While āThird Worldā acquired a derogatory meaning, its original intent, as articulated first by French philosopher Alfred Sauvy, was to distinguish (and unify) those nations emerging from under colonial rule from the material and geopolitical circumstances of the superpowers (see Chap. 5).
Similarly, āglobal Southā refers to the spacesācultural, political, and discursiveāthat constitute the part of the world which is understood as separate, and often othered by and resistant to, the culturally and economically global North.7 Despite its strengths in referencing relations of power as they are constituted through space and social relations, the term āglobal Southā is not without its problems. It invokes a binary division between North and South that negates the possibility of the colonized taking up or remaking colonial cultures and suggests a unitary āSouthernā culture, often overlooking ambivalent or hybrid colonial identities.8 Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)āthose nations that are deemed to be at an economic disadvantage relative to the rest of the worldāi...