Sport for development and peace: alignment, administration, power

Abstract

For decades now the modern liberal state has justied investment in sport from public funds based upon a construction of the idea of sport as a public ‘good’. For example, the UK government invests in grassroots participation in sport through the agency ‘Sport England’, to increase participation. It does this, it states, to create ‘sporting habits for life’; the more people that play sport, the better (Sport England 2014). At the same time, the scale and scope of charities (both international and domestic) grew exponentially in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) sector evolved as a hybrid of these two broad tendencies, overlapping as it does, where social and economic development meets the use of sport as a vehicle for desirable social and behavioural changes.