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Article
International Review for the
Sociology of Sport
45(3) 258–272
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1012690210374525
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John Sugden, Chelsea School, University of Brighton, Hillbrow, Denton Road, Eastbourne BN20 7SP , UKEmail: [anonimizat] left-realism and
sport interventions in divided societies
John Sugden
University of Brighton, UK
Abstract
What, if any, is the value of sport to processes of peace and reconciliation? After introducing
the largely rhetorical arguments for and against the value of using sport as a vehicle to promote peace building in divided societies, this article makes a more detailed and forensic examination of the evidence based on: the role played by sport in South Africa before and after apartheid; and second, drawing upon the author’s own experiences garnered over more than two decades of conducting research and leading sport-based intervention initiatives in Northern Ireland and Israel. The article argues that sport is intrinsically value neutral and under carefully managed circumstances it can make a positive if modest contribution to peace building. The mobilization of an engaged sociological imagination in the context of a broader human rights agenda is central to this contribution. Drawing upon notions of pragmatism, left realism and praxis, the article concludes by presenting a ‘ripple effect’ model that illustrates the circumstances under which sport can make a difference in the promotion of social justice and human rights in deeply divided societies.
Keywords
critical left-realism, divided societies, sport-for-development
This article seeks to answer two interrelated questions. First, what, if any, is the value of
sport to processes of peace and reconciliation? Second, how important is it to have a critical and reflexive ‘sociological imagination’ when involved in the design and deliv-ery of programmes of sporting intervention in areas of socio-economic and political turmoil? For more than three decades as a left-leaning sociologist I have been involved in the critical scrutiny of sport and have spent almost as much time as an advocate and activist, attempting to use sport as a vehicle to promote mutual understanding, reconcili-ation and co-existence in deeply divided societies. This is quite unusual inasmuch as many, if not most, left-wing academic contemporaries can find little good to write or say
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about the social value of sport (Bairner, 2009), and even less are themselves actively
engaged in sport-related social intervention. This essay argues that being a critical scholar of sport and a sport activist need not be incompatible or counterproductive. On the con-trary, I argue that brought together they can be a potent force for positive social change.
Broadly the article has three sections: to begin with, in very general terms, it outlines
the key features of rhetorical/historical arguments and debates, for and against, which surround the question of the role sport plays in the process of peace making; second, it summarizes and evaluates selected sport-related community relations contexts and proj-ects that I have drawn upon for inspiration and in some cases have been a key player in the design and delivery of, showing how this has influenced my own thinking; finally, it demonstrates how this practical engagement in combination with a broader scholarly knowledge of the field helps to inform a theoretical positioning, concluding by present-ing a theoretical model for guiding and understanding sport interventions in deeply frac-tured societies.
Sport: Peace maker or warmonger?
As a starting point let us consider George Orwell’s often quoted sentiment that sport is ‘war minus the shooting’ (Orwell, 1970: 63) which is open to a variety of interpretations. Orwell harboured bitter memories of his experiences of sports at public school in England where, as an athletic underachiever, he had been dominated, bullied and brutal-ized by muscle-bound pupils and tyrannical games masters (1952). Years later he coined the phrase ‘war minus the shooting’ in an essay about the Moscow Dynamo soccer team’s post-war tour of Britain in 1945. In this essay, Orwell argued that far from help-ing to improve international relations between the West and the Soviet Union – the stated intentions of the tour organizers – by providing opportunities for public and col-lective displays of aggressive sportive nationalism, contests such as this were likely to make the impending Cold War even icier. Here is a key passage from Orwell’s statement on the subject:
It [sport] is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic
pleasure . . . If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles and Italians and Jugoslavs [ sic],
each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. (Orwell, 1970: 63–4)
Countering Orwell’s dystopian view of sport, there are those who believe that it can
serve as a cathartic alternative to war, that the playing of competitive sports provides
distinctive communities (nations, regions, towns and so forth) with opportunities to
express distinctiveness and rivalry without threatening the wider social order (Goodhart and Chataway, 1968). Related to this view, there are others who cite the fabled ancient Olympic truce or ekecheiria when it is believed that otherwise warring city states of
ancient Greece lay down their weapons for the duration of the original Olympic festival (McIntosh, 1993). In modern times, the spirit of the Olympic Truce is regularly evoked in the context of today’s Olympics. Likewise the impromptu truce in the Great War
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260 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3)
during Christmas 1914 and the various soccer matches played between British and
German soldiers in and around no-man’s-land, is used to exemplify the capacity of sport to divert, albeit temporarily, hostile communities (Foreman, 1993): for both of these cases it is sport instead of the shooting. More recent events that are often cited positively
are political overtures between nations in conflict such as ‘ping pong diplomacy’ between the USA and China in the early 1970s, or ‘cricket diplomacy’ between India and Pakistan in the 2000s – although the highly complex, contingent and extremely fragile nature of these processes are rarely stressed (Croft, 2005; Dutt, 1974; Hong and Sun, 2000).
Others, mainly sports administrators and allied politicians, go a stage further and are
even more optimistic about sport’s capacity to promote peace and understanding, believ-ing that it offers more than a haven for the temporary suspension of conflict. Elsewhere in this volume, Fred Coalter (2010) provides a comprehensive critical review of the emergence of ‘sport-in-development’ as a policy-related social movement. In doing so he points out that, while there is a wide variety of traditions and typologies characteristic of this field, this, the dominant model is based on the a prori assumption that in and of itself sport is a social good. Most advocates of this position will have been long-time sports participants and enthusiasts. If sport was good for them, it must be good for others and the intrinsic value of sport as a social good is rarely questioned. They believe in the fra-ternal and character-building qualities of sport and in its capacity to bring together diverse people and communities as demonstrated in global sport festivals, such as the modern Olympics or the World Cup Finals. The literature of the modern Olympic move-ment and other national and world sports governing bodies reflects this and is littered with the rhetoric of this ‘sports evangelism’ (Hill, 1992). For instance, in an interview with the author in 1997, Joao Havelange, the outgoing President of FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, spoke of his last great ambition in terms that both echo and directly contradict Orwell’s views:
One day during the World Cup [USA ’94] I had a telephone call from Al Gore [vice president
of the United States]. At that time Gore was involved in negotiating for a peaceful settlement in the Middle East. Mr Gore said he really had no experience of football before, but he was amazed that the World Cup could be so perfectly organized and that so many people could become so passionately involved. He was greatly inspired by this and asked would it not be possible to have a match between Palestine and Israel, organized by FIFA? The project is now indeed to have such a match, Palestine versus Israel, ideally in New York – New York being the seat of the United Nations – just to show the politicians football can do things that they cannot! (cited in Sugden and Tomlinson, 1998: 240)
Who is right, Orwell or Havelange? History favours Orwell as there are more exam-
ples of international sport damaging community relations as there are instances of it
making a positive contribution to peace and understanding. The metaphorical relation-ship between sport and war – one through which theatres of conflict are analysed and talked about in the language of sport – is almost as old as modern sport itself. Who can forget the claim that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Orwell’s old school, Eton? While the ‘soccer truce’ on Christmas day 1914 is often remembered, it is less well known that during the Great War British regiments literally went over the top
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Sugden 261
kicking soccer balls or carrying rugby balls so as to add symbolic ardour to their attacks
on the enemy. It is also worth remembering that the armistice that ended the Great War came in 1918 not 1915, with millions more dead on both sides long after the final whistle at the Christmas day match had sounded. There are those who question the validity of the historic Olympic Truce, pointing out that while it may have existed as an ideal, it cer-tainly did not prevent the ancients waging a more of less permanent ‘war of all against all’, for which, at a time when muscle and stamina directly underpinned the practice of war, the main events of the ancient Olympics were good practice. Certainly, the modern Olympics have been blighted by a whole series of political conflicts, none worse than the hostage taking of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian militants, Black September, in Munich in 1972, which ultimately resulted in the deaths of 11 Israeli Olympians. A more recent strategy has been attempts to assassinate athletes, notably on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan in 2009. Soccer, too, has demonstrated an unequalled capacity to generate violence and conflict both on and off the field. Fan violence or hooliganism is a global problem, adversely affecting relations between towns, cities, ethnic groups, religious sects and nation-states. The worst case of sport acting as a catalyst for conflict was the ‘soccer war’ between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969 whereby a series of hotly contested World Cup qualifying matches between two countries that were already in conflict over territorial and trade issues led to a short war that left more than 30,000 killed or wounded (Kidd and MacDonnell, 2007; Sugden, 1989).
There is some limited theoretical and historical support for the palliative role of
sport from within the academic community. According to Elias and Dunning (1986), for instance, the experience of sport has, over time, had a moderating effect on social behav-iour beyond the playing field itself and as such made a positive contribution to human social development. Sport, by offering opportunities for the socially approved arousal of moderate excitement, gradually led people to exercise stricter control over their public behaviour. In short, codified sport became a ‘civilizing’ influence, not just at a local or national level, but also between nations. Others are more sceptical, believing that modern sport variously encourages aggression and violence, homophobia, racism, sexism, nationalism and political submissiveness (Alison, 2000; Brohm, 1978; J. Hargreaves, 1996; J.A. Hargreaves, 1994; Jarvie, 1991; Messner and Sabo, 1994; Young, 2000). Undoubtedly, sport is a very important element of collective identity, carrying meaning beyond anything intrinsic to the activity itself. Even in (relatively) stable societies, a high degree of social stratification and racial/ethnic heterogeneity means that expressions of shared identities through sport are complex, often ambiguous and can be generative of class distinctions and cross-community animosity and conflict. Sport concurrently includes and excludes. When there is a lack of shared understanding about what pre-cisely constitutes ‘the nation’ and/or a legitimately sovereign state, the function of sport in the politics of community identification and celebration is even more problematic. In this regard it is argued that sport is a fiercely contested element of ‘civil society’ – that
area of civic culture and popular participation that stands outside the formal institutions of state but is nonetheless vital in securing consensus and control for those occupying the commanding heights of ‘political society’. Understanding the role that sport can play in the relationship between political and civil society is a key to understanding any role it can have in promoting progressive social change.
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262 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3)
Despite the counter-arguments of the sport evangelists and the sport heretics, note
should be taken of Bruce Kidd’s view that, in and of itself, sport is of no intrinsic value:
it is neither naturally good nor irrevocably bad. It is, like all collective human endeav-ours, a social construction which is malleable according to the social forces that sur-round it. Kid captures this position well when he says, ‘caution should be taken not to “essentialise sport” and the role it plays in societies – in fact it would be preferable to think of “sport” as a plurality of forms that have different results in different contexts’ (Kidd, 2008: 379). This is why sport can be claimed and proclaimed in the name of both complementary and contradictory social goals and practices and this regard con-text is everything.
Sport and intervention: Examples from the field
The classic example of how sport can be manipulated adapted to entirely different ends is provided by South Africa. For most of the 20th century sport was an institutionalized feature of the country’s racialized social and political landscape. Under apartheid, like any other significant theatre of social interaction, sport both symbolized and reinforced a white-dominated pattern of ethnic and racial stratification and power relations. White South Africa’s sense of its standing in the world was bound up with its sport prowess, and the strength of this ‘sportive nationalism’ was dependent on the achievements of its white-only sports teams, particularly in the favoured sports of the post-colonial elite: cricket and rugby especially. Imbued as it was with the odious values of apartheid the White Supremacist State saw in sport a reflection of itself.
For the majority of disenfranchised racial and ethnic categories, white South Africa’s
obsession with sport presented an opportunity to destabilize the apartheid regime by successfully lobbying the international community to impose a sport boycott on that country. ‘No normal sport in an abnormal society’ became a clarion call for anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and overseas, a position behind which, eventually, all significant global sport governing bodies gathered. While it would be an over-statement to say that the sport boycott alone led to the demise of apartheid and white rule in South Africa, it is generally agreed that it did play a major part in its destabilization (Black, 1999; Bose, 1994).
Since the end of apartheid sport has played a dramatically different role in the con-
struction of the new South Africa. Nobody understood better the dynamic power of sport to promote social and political change than Nelson Mandela. While he was a great sup-porter of the boycott, he also believed that once white rule was over, the residual passion for sport could be harnessed to the cause of constructing a new and transformed South African national identity. Mandela articulated the philosophy that inspired his belief in the transformative power of sport when he said, ‘sport has the power to unite people in a way little else can. Sport can awaken hope where there was previously only despair. It breaks down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of discrimination. Sport speaks to peo-ple in a language they can understand’ (Mandela, 2000).
This was more than rhetoric for Mandela. Rather than eschew the sports that had been
most symbolic of white supremacy – cricket and rugby football – upon his release from prison to become leader of the ANC and eventually his nation’s first non-white President,
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Mandela supported the lifting of sport sanctions and encouraged all races to unite behind
the national teams that he believed could be gradually remodelled to reflect a vibrant and peaceful multi-racial state. Almost miraculously in 1995, one year into his Presidency, South Africa hosted and won the Rugby World Cup enabling Mandela, famously dressed in a Springbok shirt and cap, to present the Webb Ellis Trophy to the Afrikaner team captain, Francois Pienaar. The following year he was able to perform a similarly high-profile piece of sporting theatre when he turned out in the blazer, tie and cap of the newly formed United Cricket Board (UCB) of South African to congratulate the triumphant national side as it wrapped up a comprehensive Test series win over England. Shortly afterwards he completed a memorable hat-trick when garbed in green and gold kit of the national soccer team – Bafana Bafana – he presented team captain, Neil Tovey, the
African Cup of Nations in front of 80,000 cheering fans in Soweto’s FNB stadium.
Meanwhile, as Marion Keim (2003) has demonstrated, away from the spotlights,
beneath the surface, at two different levels, measures have been put in place to gradually reform the deep structure of sport. First, sport governing bodies have introduced a num-ber of complementary, and sometimes controversial, strategies to ensure that the princi-ple of multiculturalism influences not only the apex of the pyramid of elite performance, but more importantly the broad base of mass sport participation. In conjunction with this in the schools and the communities a large number and wide range of sport-based com-munity relations initiatives have been introduced, not just to promote reconciliation and inter-racial harmony, but also to help tackle a variety of social and welfare problems such as HIV and juvenile crime and violence. Likewise, Höglund and Sundberg (2008) researching national and regional sport policies down to grassroots interventions have emphasized the contextualized, nuanced and multi-level nature of sport-based develop-ment work in post-apartheid South Africa. While there remains much work to be done in South Africa – both in terms of direct action and research and evaluation – we can cau-tiously conclude that sport, if imbued with socially progressive values and organized and managed correctly, can play a role in promoting peace and reconciliation in even the most fractured and deeply divided societies.
The politics of sport in South Africa was a prominent theme in the Sociology of Sport
course that I taught in the early 1980s at the Northern Ireland Polytechnic (now the University of Ulster, Jordanstown) on the outskirts of Belfast. This was a very turbulent time in and the ‘Troubles’ – as the undeclared civil war between British Loyalists and Irish Nationalists became known – was at its height with widespread shootings, bomb-ings and civil disorder. On arrival in Belfast I was warned by a mentor not to address local political issues in my teaching. Which is why, one sunny September morning, I was talking to a group of students about sport in South Africa and not sport in Northern Ireland. Suddenly an enormous explosion shook the classroom’s bomb-proof windows through which I saw the top of the adjacent teaching block being blasted hundreds of feet into the air. Later it turned out that the Provisional IRA had targeted a criminology exam-ination being taken by a group of policemen from the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) and detonated explosives that killed four and injured many more.
This was a transformative moment as I determined that from then on, instead of inves-
tigating the politics and sport in what were to me exotic, distant lands, I would concen-trate on making sense of this complex relationship in what was to become for 14 years
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264 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3)
my own backyard. With a colleague, Alan Bairner, we embarked on a programme of
research and scholarship through which we were able to challenge the received wisdom that while all else may be conflict and chaos, at that time sport in Ulster was a neutral safe-haven in which communities otherwise at odds with one another could come together amicably. On the contrary, we were able to demonstrate and argue that sport was a part of the problem, and like most other elements of Northern Ireland was organized and played along sectarian lines (Sugden and Bairner, 1995, 2000).
This was also the moment that the sports activist in me began to emerge. I was heav-
ily involved in coaching student sport. At that time a university environment was one of the few places were young Protestants and Catholics could meet and interact. However, many of the student sports teams followed the sectarian pattern prevalent in the wider society, with Protestants playing games of Anglo-origin such as rugby, cricket and hockey; Catholics engaging mainly with Gaelic games such as hurling, Gaelic football and camogie. Arguably, while my own sport (association) football is (arguably) an English invention, it is also a universal game which was popular with Loyalists and Nationalists alike and played by both communities – although not usually in combined teams. Contrary to this pattern, at university the football team that I coached was mixed – as were the combined Northern Ireland and all-Ireland student teams that I later went on to manage. As I coached and travelled with the teams to resi-dential competitions I watched as friendships blossomed across the community divide, many of which are sustained to this day.
Thus I learned that in relatively neutral settings, given a common cause and goal, a
shared set of values, and a committed mentor, a sport team was an excellent crucible within which to nurture intimacy and mutuality. I did not see why this experience had to be limited to groups who might be described as relatively elite in Northern Ireland; those who were university educated. To this end, in cooperation with colleagues at the Institute of International Sport at the University of Rhode Island, USA, we developed the Belfast United concept. Using mainly soccer but also basketball, this was a sport programme for Catholics and Protestant boys drawn from some of the more entrenched and mutually hostile Belfast communities. Ethnically mixed teams, shaped in the neutral setting of a university campus, were then taken on playing and coaching tours of the USA where they were hosted in mixed (Catholic and Protestant) pairs by American families. Although initially small in scale, accompanying research and evaluation demonstrated that Belfast United did have a measurable, positive impact on the young people who participated, and also helped to inspire larger and much more ambitious cross-community residential sport festivals both in Northern Ireland and the USA (Sugden, 1991).
Importantly, this intervention was not done in isolation from other ongoing avenues
of research and critical scholarship. On the contrary, applied knowledge gained from learning about the structure, process and politics of sport in Northern Ireland in general was used to inform and shape Belfast United and related grassroots interventions. At the same time, information emanating from researching and evaluating these interventions fed into a growing corpus of critical scholarship that in turn began to have an impact upon the Policy Community for Sport – clusters of government, private and voluntary stakeholders as well as pressure groups that shaped the wider institutional agenda for sport in a given region (Houlihan, 1997). By 1996, the Sports Council for Northern
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Ireland had developed and introduced a Community Relations Policy for Sport, while
most local councils and sport governing bodies had employed dedicated Sport and Community Relations Officers. This was all part of a very complex interaction of social, economic and political initiatives that were contributing and giving momentum to a peace process that has gone from strength to strength. While it is impossible to say how much the combined critical interventions in the world of sport outlined herein have con-tributed to this, in some small way at least, a more progressive, proactive and politically sensitive approach to sport has contributed in some way to making Northern Ireland a more peaceful and prosperous place to live, work and play.
The knowledge and experience gleaned from my days in Northern Ireland travelled
with me when I took up a new post at the University of Brighton in 1996. In 2000 I was approached by a group of well-meaning, non-aligned, private citizens who, frustrated with watching from their armchairs nightly news bulletins filled with scenes of conflict and violence in Israel and Palestine, wanted to do something to make a contribution to the faltering peace process there. They had the idea that football might be something that could be used as a vehicle to help overcome mistrust. As someone who had experience of developing and directing sport-based community relations projects – albeit in a very different setting – I was invited to sit in on some of their early meetings and act as an advisor. Gradually, my involvement became more and more operational as what began as a relatively modest project involving half a dozen volunteer coaches from the UK working with approximately 60 children from one community in Northern Israel, grew year by year until by 2009 over 50 volunteers were working on a series of parallel proj-ects incorporating more than 40 Jewish and Arab communities and attracting around 1000 children.
This programme, called Football for Peace (F4P), has grown not just quantitatively
but also qualitatively. In broad outline, F4P aims to use values-based football coaching to build bridges between neighbouring Jewish and Arab towns and villages in Israel, and in doing so make a modest contribution to the peace process in this most troubled of regions. The work of F4P seeks to make pragmatic and incremental grassroots interven-tions into the sport culture of Israel, helping to build bridges between otherwise divided communities, while at the same time making a contribution to political/policy debates around sport in the region. The broad view taken by F4P is that Israel will be better placed and more willing and able to move towards a peaceful settlement with the Palestinian Authority and its neighbouring Arab-dominated countries once it has grown equitable and harmonious relations between with the 20 percent Arab and 80 percent Jewish populations living within its existing boundaries.
F4P’s fourfold aims are to: provide opportunities for social contact across community
boundaries; promote mutual understanding; engender in participants a desire for and commitment to peaceful coexistence; and enhance sports skills and technical knowledge about sport. In order to achieve these goals, a dedicated values-based teaching curricu-lum has been developed along with a coaching style through the modelling of which participants are encouraged to demonstrate appreciation of the basic qualities of good citizenship, namely: respect, trust, responsibility, equality and inclusivity. In summary, a series of CCSPs (Cross Community Sports Partnerships) have been established, involv-ing small clusters of Jewish and Arab towns and villages. In these CCSPs, over six
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266 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3)
consecutive days at alternative Jewish and Arab community venues, children are coached
in mixed groups (Arab and Jewish) growing into teams and taking part in end-of-project football and multi-activity festivals. Parallel to the football training there is an off-pitch programme of trust-building, recreational and cultural activities. In respect for local tra-ditions and customs, one project is for girls only and is staffed entirely by female coaches. In addition, F4P has twice-yearly training camps – one in Europe and one in Israel – dur-ing which volunteer coaches from Israel and other countries are schooled in the method-ology of F4P before helping with the delivery of the programme during the summer months in Israel itself (fuller details about this programme can be found in Sugden and Wallis, 2007, and the F4P website http://www.football4peace.eu/).
The development of a network of partnerships has been crucial to the success and
continuing growth of the project. First, there are the community partners: the dozens of Arab and Jewish towns and villages that willingly provide their children as well as vol-unteer coaches and leaders to work alongside their European counterparts. Then there is a growing list of key institutional partners including the British Council, the Israeli Sports Authority, the (English) FA, the German Sport University, the London Marathon, and the University of Brighton. In complementary ways all of these organizations have helped with the planning and resourcing of the programme, as well as providing important moral and intellectual input. Building on lessons learned in Northern Ireland, engagement with and expansion of this stratum of influential institutional players has dramatically enhanced the potential impact of F4P, helping to connect the relatively microscopic community-level interventions with the wider Policy Community for sport and in doing so promote social change on a much larger scale. For instance, the British Council, the (English) FA and, most importantly, the Israeli Sports Authority have all adapted and developed their own approaches to community relations work with sport through engaging with and learning from F4P.
As Coalter has pointed out, realistic and objective evaluation is a crucial element of
successful sport-in-development programmes (Coalter, 2006). At every level of its artic-ulation, applied research and evaluation have been essential features of F4P. The research has a complex, two-way dynamic: ongoing learning about the transcending social and political context that is used in the pragmatic design and development of the programme of intervention; and detailed evaluation of the impact of the project at each level, up to and including, where possible, tracking its influence on the transcending social and polit-ical context. This circular and inclusive approach to research and evaluation has helped the project to develop organically, from the bottom up, as the knowledge and viewpoints gleaned form all key actors and stakeholders are used to refine and reform interventions year on year. It has also helped to facilitate growing local ownership and sustainability of the project as the communities themselves take increasing responsibility for the design and delivery of F4P events, as well as using ideas drawn from this experience in the development of programmes of cross-community cooperation outside of the F4P frame-work. Now this article turns from the lessons drawn from the field towards the critical theoretical sounding board against which these lessons are interpreted and fed back into project (re)development.
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A critical left-realist approach to sport and social intervention
Whether articulated or inferred, social activism requires epistemological foundations.
Based on the works of the American philosophers and educationalists, William James (1979) and John Dewy (1935), critical pragmatism advocates the science of the possible whereby action and intervention are linked to outcomes that are themselves based upon a critical assessment of what can be achieved within a given set of situational circum-stances. Critical pragmatism places emphasis on theoretical development and refine-ment through critical, practical, empirical engagement, rather than fixating upon abstract debate and unmoveable theoretical principles. This view recognizes that the construc-tion of society is not passively structural, but is an embodied process of individual and collective actions. As Alison Kadlec puts it, ‘much is missed when we impose artificial arrests on a world in flux, as not only does this impede our ability to perceive deeper and more nuanced relations of power that constrain and repress, this also stunts our ability to perceive and cultivate new possibilities for change’ (2007: 3).
The emergence of left realism within critical criminology can in some ways be viewed
as a branch of critical pragmatism. Disillusioned with conventional theories of crime and
deviance emanating from the political right, and the failure of class struggle/revolution-fixated Marxists to provide the foundation for the development of an agenda for empiri-cal investigation and intervention, scholars developed a new approach that became known as left realism. This new paradigm allowed for the mobilization of a radical and critical sociological imagination in determining strategies for progressive and pragmatic engagement with social problems with a view to influencing local policies and interven-tions that could improve the conditions of society’s most vulnerable groups. Space does not permit a full discussion on the merits or otherwise of left realism, but that can be found elsewhere (Downes and Rock, 2003; Lea, 1987; Taylor, 1999; Young, 1991). Suffice it to say that for some radical thinkers and doers it can offer a way out of the inertia so often brought on by ideological reification. While left realism developed with particular foci on deviance and crime, a similar form of ‘praxis’ has been advocated in the context of sports activism by Marxist scholar, Ian McDonald, who argues that rather than being satisfied with armchair critique, ‘a radical sociology of sport should be seek-ing to assist the reconfiguration of the culture of sport by intervening against dominant relations of power’ (McDonald, 2002: 101). This kind of critical left-realism can be applied equally to a range of sport for development programmes, including those that focus on fractured community relations and social conflict in divided societies.
Of course, even with strategies based on critical left-realism, engagement in social
activism of any kind requires those involved to have an agreed starting position and
defined goals to work towards. This can be a minefield, particularly when working in contexts of deep division and conflict when the antagonistic groups and social fractions that are brought together espouse antithetical ideologies and mutually exclusive goals. When this is the case it is vitally important for practitioners to maintain a neutral stance with regard to those conflicting goals, while at the same time articulating a rationale for social and political intervention that does not expose those engaged in this work to
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268 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3)
charges of cultural imperialism, proselytism, and/or hegemonic legitimization. Outside of
reverting to religious and/or ideological doctrine or falling prey to the inertia of cultural relativism, Donnelly and Kidd have argued that ‘those of us committed to opportunities for humane sport and physical activity ought to resort more systematically to the strategy of establishing, publicizing and drawing upon the charters, declarations and covenants that enshrine codes of entitlement and conduct’ (2000: 135).
This begs the question, which ‘codes of entitlement’? The United Nations Charter
for Human rights is one of the few touchstones for governing activism that has near universal approval – although account should be taken of arguments claiming that ‘human rights’ is a conceptual philosophy rooted in Western liberal thought (Tomuschat, 2003). Article 26 of the UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘edu-cation shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.’ The value of sport in furthering these goals is something recognized by the United Nations itself, which in 2003 empowered a Task Force to look into the role of sport in the con-text of development and peace; the UN now has a Special Advisor whose mandate is to encourage the global utilization of sport in the service of the UN’s Human Rights agenda. In 2005, the then Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan, launched the UN’s Year of Sport declaring ‘sport is a universal language.
A
t its best sport can bring people
together, no matter what their origin, background, religious beliefs or economic status. A
nd
when young people participate in sports or have access to physical education, they can experience real exhilaration even as they learn the ideals of teamwork and tolerance’ (Annan, 2005).
As Coalter and others have argued, paper declarations and accompanying rhetoric are
well meaning but useless without intervention (Coalter, 2006, 2010; Fraser, 2008). Yet the question remains: how and where to intervene? To begin with, the notion of ‘peace’ is itself an illusive and problematic concept embracing a variety of meanings from ‘the absence of war’ to ‘a state of equilibrium and tranquillity’, and many things in between. In addition, peace ‘processes’ are messy affairs: hugely complex enterprises that move forwards or backwards according to conditions prevalent in the transcending social and political order. Usually, they are driven by activities and actors in political society. However, if there are major social and cultural impediments, ‘road maps to peace’ that take account of the political sphere alone are doomed to failure. Changes of heart and mind do not ordinarily take place because of political initiatives. Peace is only possible when significant proportions of ordinary people are ready for and open to conflict resolu-tion. By way of illustration, politicians may be in the driving seat but for the ‘peace bus’ to get anywhere meaningful along its road map there must be passengers willing to climb on board. This comes gradually through social and cultural engagement in everyday life. The challenge for peace activists is to discover ways to join up specific grassroots, civil society, interventions with more broadly influential policy communities and those ele-ments of political society that hold the keys to peace.
The ‘ripple effect’ model in Figure 1 draws on critical left-realism to depict how this
can be achieved. In this diagram the outer circle represents a Human Rights agenda, the
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Sugden 269
local focus of which is framed by the prevailing Transcending Social and Political
Context, including the Peace Process, represented by the next circle. Taken together they provide a framework upon which to make pragmatic judgements about the structure of the project and its development goals. The two inner circles represent each Cross Community Sport Partnership, consisting first and foremost of children from different stakeholder communities, surrounded by adult volunteer coaches and significant others (relatives, teachers, community leaders, etc.) from the local communities, and the inter-national volunteers. The nature of the structure, organization, management and delivery of activities and encounters taking place within these two circles is crucial in determining the outcome of any such sport intervention. In between, working from the middle out-wards, the next circle comprises representatives from a network of institutional partners through whom ideas and findings emanating form the project can be articulated within the wider policy community for sport. This in turn may influence events taking shape in the transcending social and political context and have an impact on the local human rights situation not only of those directly involved in the project but also further afield. Each level of the process is subject to research and evaluation and these findings are fed back to inform project modification, growth and redevelopment. The different thicknesses and permeability of the concentric circles is to indicate that, just like a stone dropped into a still pool of water, the ripple effect of an intervention like F4P dissipates as it moves fur-ther from the centre where the impact is more obviously felt and more easily measured.Figure 1. The ‘ripple effect’ model
Political
SocietyPolicyCommunitiesEmbodiedPartnershipsLocalPoliticiansSignificantOthersChildrenProject impacts on and changes the
context improving human rights,contributing to peace
Human rights + contextinforms project structure anddevelopmentResearch & Evaluation
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270 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3)
Of course, as Michael Mann reminds us societies ‘are much messier than our theories
of them’ (Mann, 1986: 4) and the reality of an intervention such as Football for Peace is
decidedly more fluid, complex and fickle than this rather simplistic, ripple-effect model might imply. In many ways the reality is more like Lederach’s (2005) ‘web approach’ to peace building whereby, starting with a small focus, the strategy is to build organic networks of relationships among individuals, communities and institutions around the delivery, development and expansion of that focus. Like a real spider’s web, the more threads there are, the thicker they get and the more anchor points they have, will make them more robust thus enabling them to better withstand potential damage and be more amenable to repair should damage occur. Finally, while the above figure is a structural representation, in reality it is an embodied process and the success of any endeavour will depend on the animation and agency provided by key actors operating across and between each level of activity.
Conclusion
Sport for development is somewhat of a growth industry with a plethora of transnational, national, regional and local government and non-government agencies already on or entering the field. As is more fully argued by Coalter in his contribution to this special issue, much of this intervention work, although well meaning, can be both idealistic and simplistic, invoking the mythic and largely unproven (and under researched) ‘opiate’ capabilities of all things related to sport (Redeker, 2008). Drawing on Pawson (2006), Coalter concludes:
Rather than seeking simply to assert sport’s almost magical properties, or commission ‘research’
which proves ‘success’ (however defined), what is required is a developmental approach based on the de-reification of ‘sport’ and a concentration on understanding the social processes and mechanisms which might lead to desired outcomes for some participants or some organizations
in certain circumstances. (Coalter, 2010, emphasis in original)
Drawing from experience in the field and ongoing critical self-reflection, this article
has attempted to provide a way of thinking about, planning, and doing sport for devel-
opment work that is neither idealistic nor simplistic: one that is justified from a humani-tarian perspective; accounts fully for the local context; engages with and empowers local actors and partners; and connects with wider national and regional policy processes. Further to this I have attempted to show how a fully informed ‘sociological imagination’, in combination with practical engagement and local contextual emersion, work best together in strategic planning and project implementation – even in the most adverse situations when rockets rain down, tanks move in and all sides go back to the trenches claiming right along with God is with them. To invoke the words attributed to the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’. It is to be hoped that the adoption of a critical left-realist approach to sport for development work can provide activists – including sociologists – with both reason and method for doing something positive.
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Sugden 271
Acknowledgements
Versions of this article were presented in keynote addresses at the European Fair Play Movement’s
Annual Congress in Nicosia, Cyprus, 1–3 October 2008, and at the Second Sport, Race and
Ethnicity Conference, University of Technology Sydney, 30 November–2 December 2008. This article was subject to full peer review supervised by the guest editors and beyond the influence of the author who is usually the Editor of IRSS.
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