Abstract
On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, former IRSS Editor John Sugden, one of the foremost scholars to advance a critical sociology of sport and to apply its tenets to Sport for Development (SDP) programmes, reflects on a key question about how the sociology of sport has and can inform social and political activism that engages sport. Noting a ‘new orthodoxy that dominates the SDP sector’, there is a pressing need for a more critical sociology of sport in engaging strategies, and understanding the limits, of sport in the service of conflict reduction and peace making in divided societies. Building on the tenets of Wright Mills and his notion of ‘the sociological imagination’ and the work of Brewer connecting it to the ending of violence, Sugden calls on the sociology of sport community to bring critical engagement to the advancement and refinement of using sport as a mechanism to bring about changes in social relations and in the reduction of conflict in divided societies. While it is noted that sport cannot be a panacea for development and conflict reduction, it can play an important role in practical interventions aided by a critical sociology of sport.
Reflections on the sociology of sport: pondering a key question
This 50th anniversary essay affords the opportunity to complete an answer long overdue to a testing question. The question was asked of me after a staff and postgraduate student seminar I delivered at the University of Loughborough in 2006. Here I highlighted key challenges that were faced and overcome while instituting sport-based peace-building and conflict resolution programmes in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and later in the Middle East. Upon finishing my presentation, I was asked a familiar array of questions by students mainly concerned with project design and logistical project delivery issues. After such queries, one of the tutors, Dominic Malcolm, raised his hand and asked, ‘Professor Sugden, what difference does the fact that you are a sociologist make to your participation in and leadership of development programmes like the ones featured in your talk?’
It is not often that I hesitate before answering post-presentation queries, but this was an intriguing question that caused me to pause for thought before eventually blustering through what was at best an incomplete answer, saying as I recall ‘surely it makes a difference, inasmuch as being a sociologist isn’t just a job, it’s more a vocation, that is a way of life, and as such everything you think about interpret and how you act consequentially is filtered through that tutored sociological gaze’. ‘So, inevitably all of my work, including and especially projects like the ones featured in this talk have been and continue to be strongly influenced by that sociological perspective, which in my experience tends not to be the case for other sport-based socio-political interventions with which I am familiar’.
While this off-the-cuff answer was an honest reflection of the way I thought at the time about the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) work with which I had been heavily involved for several decades, later back in my hotel room as I reflected on my performance in the seminar and thought more about the response I had given to Malcolm’s question I realised that while my bluster may have satisfied the audience that evening it was an answer that had not quite satisfied me.
Can sport save the world? The sociological lens and Sport for Development and Peace
Often it is simple questions that demand the most testing and complex answers and for some years after the Loughborough seminar, as I continued to engage with SDP-related fieldwork, and propelled by an acquired inner sociological inquisitiveness, I have searched for a more convincing answer to Malcolm’s intriguing question. Delivering such an answer is even more important now at a time when the SDP enterprise has been overcome by a faddish and fashionable bandwagon populated and driven by SDP evangelists who, as Coalter (2010) has pointed out, often enter the sport environment unshakable in their belief that intrinsically sport is a force for social good. This is an ideological viewpoint captured by the words of Nelson Mandela, who proclaimed that sport has ‘the power to save the world’. It is also a mantra often repeated by the SDP faithful at congresses, seminars and award ceremonies held at regular intervals around the globe. It embraces a new orthodoxy that dominates the SDP sector and is reinforced by corporate carpetbaggers and their allies in international government and non-government agencies and sport governing bodies whose preening and posturing leaders and their fawning apparatchiks occupy the commanding heights of the SDP governing architecture. Here, they frequently use the evangelical and philanthropic rhetoric of SDP and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to mask their shameless profiteering and vainglorious power brokerage.
The widespread currency of this ideology is much evident in an article in the world’s most widely read sports magazine, Sports Illustrated. Here a feature article, written by Senior Sports Writer, Alexander Wolff (2011), entitled ‘Sport Saves the World!’ reports the conclusions from a worldwide investigation about how the SDP movement has flourished in the 21st century. To research his story, Wolf visited sport development programmes across diverse and contested socio-political enclaves. These included Palestine’s West Bank, war-torn communities in the former Yugoslavia, beleaguered townships and shanty towns in sub-Saharan Africa and the impoverished favelas of South America’s great cities. En route he interviewed practitioners and experts to shed light on what was a little explored area of journalistic inquiry. Before he embarked on this journey, I spoke with Wolff in Boston in 2010.
We had first met almost two decades earlier in Belfast in 1993, at a particularly violent and murderous phase of the troubles in Northern Ireland, as Wolf was leading a Sports Illustrated team of journalists and photographers to Northern Ireland to cover a particularly controversial and emblematic FIFA World Cup qualifying match between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Played at Belfast’s Windsor Park, the game generated an imaginably hateful and vengeful atmosphere. During that visit, he contacted me for further insight about the socio-political context of sport in Northern Ireland, something that I had researched and written extensively about (Sugden and Bairner, 1993).
Shortly before Wolff’s visit to Belfast, in an attempt to challenge what looked to be increasingly corrosive sectarian influences that blighted sport in Northern Ireland, I had launched Belfast United, one of the world’s first sport-based community relations and conflict resolution programmes (Sugden, 1991). The day after attending the World Cup qualifier, I invited Wolff and his team to attend a Belfast United practice session where he was able to witness Catholic and Protestant children playing football happily together, in stark contrasted to the hate-filled ambience he and his colleagues had experienced during and after the combustible Windsor Park international match the night before. Wolff’s report about these contrasting experiences was featured in a November 1993 Sports Illustrated article, entitled ‘Peacefully Done’ (Wolff, 1993).
During our earlier conversations in Boston, Wolff confided that his memories of Catholic and Protestant children peacefully playing had stayed with him and provided impetus for the 2011 ‘Sport Saves the World!’ feature. Despite the quasi-evangelical tone suggested by the title, it is clear from the article that Wolff is by no means convinced about the intrinsically palliative qualities of sport when it comes to solving social problems. He asks ‘can such sport projects make a lasting difference, or is the dream of salvation through sports too grandiose?’ (Wolf, 2011: 65). Indeed, this suggests to me that article’s title should have more accurately been stated as a question: ‘Can Sport Save the World and if so how’? Formulating the answer to this question takes us back to the question asked of me at the aforementioned Loughborough seminar.
Some ongoing challenges for Sport for Development and Peace
So what are the main features of a critical sociological gaze that I first advocated to an emergent SDP world in the late 1970s, and alongside others, helped to develop and champion thereafter? They are the defining features of the approach to research and scholarship adopted by the University of Brighton’s Sport and Leisure Cultures (SLC) research group. They are comprehensively spelled out in Power Games: A Critical Sociology of Sport, which I edited with joint-SLC leader Alan Tomlinson (Sugden and Tomlinson, 2002). The essays in this anthology adopt a lens that Charles Wright Mills encouraged in his landmark work, The Sociological Imagination.
I have long been influenced by the critical sociology of C Wright Mills. My first encounters were during my undergraduate years studying politics and sociology at the University of Essex in the early 1970s. Further influence came during my postgraduate years spent studying for a doctorate at the University of Connecticut. Here, my critical sociological thinking was shaped further by a former student and disciple of Wright Mills, Kenneth Neubeck.
The strongest argument for the value of deploying a Wright Mill’s influenced critical sociological perspective in SDP contexts can be found in John Brewer’s excellent thesis on the subject, entitled C. Wright Mills and the Ending of Violence (Brewer, 2003). Here, Brewer uses Wright Mill’s sociological template to comparatively make sense of the complex processes of peace-building undertaken in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel and Palestine. For me, the attractiveness of Brewer’s comparative approach had ready relevance my SDP work, which was carried out in many of the conflict regions featured in Brewer’s book. Thus, Brewer helped accelerate my own attempts to make theoretical sense of the SDP world, one in which I had been operating for many years, but which had not diminished my appetite for socio-political activism.
By engaging with Brewer’s arguments, I was finally able to formally spell out a more satisfactory and complete answer to Dominic’s Malcolm’s question. My ‘answer’ was eventually published in an article in this journal entitled ‘Critical left realism and sport interventions in divided societies’ (Sugden, 2010). A main motivation for this article was to provide an analytical framework and personal manifesto for my own SDP practice. In part, it also offered a response to some fellow liberal and/or left-leaning academics who, content to stay in their theoretical and methodological comfort zones, were somewhat sneering of my hands-on efforts to engage in peace-building activities in some of the more controversial conflict zones in the world.
In this article I show how Brewer’s interpretation and operationalisation of Wright Mills’ thesis helps us to understand how we can climb down from the fence to become effective critical sociologists and activists, while at the same making informed, realistic and pragmatic judgements about participation in progressive political and cultural interventions. Indeed, Brewer goes further in arguing that the participation of critical social scientists, in designing and organising forms of social and political activism, is essential if those interventions are to be progressive, impactful and meaningful in ways that allow us to contribute to the advancement of human rights and social justice goals. In short, paraphrasing the words of political philosopher Edmund Burke, ‘for the triumph of evil all it takes is for good people to do nothing’. Perhaps by using a critical sociological perspective in the manner outlined here concerning SDP, it at least becomes possible for the sociology of sport to contribute to progressive social change without resorting to naïve proclamations about the intrinsic power of sport.
Looking ahead: on new praxis, Sport for Development and Peace
Since the 2006 Loughborough seminar there has been a groundswell of interest in SDP work. This has brought with it a new wave of critical social science and commentary (Darnell, 2012; Darnell and Hayhurst, 2009; Giulianotti, 2011; Kay, 2009; Kidd, 2008; Levermore, 2010; Rookwood and Palmer, 2011). While this new critical wave of thinking about SDP is encouraging, a word of caution is necessary. There is danger that, in this scramble for academic legitimacy, the value of using a critical sociology of sport in the service of social and political practice may be washed away as theoretical sophistication and positivistic methodological rigour is prioritised over the production of evidence and practice-based insights that will aid activists in the field. To forestall this happening, what may be required in the world of SDP in particular, and perhaps the sociology of sport more broadly, is some fresh thinking about the nature of the relationship between research practice, theory building and socio-political activism.
In my own work, I have tried to show, in the development and application of the Ripple Effect model (Sugden, 2010: 269), that these three theatres of sociological engagement should not be considered in isolation. Rather, they benefit from interrelated/symbiotic consideration, in so doing facilitating praxis infused with critically informed research strategies, sociologically framed field practices and calibrated interventions. All of this aims at the generation and accumulation of data and evidence that can stimulate opportunities for on-going critical reflection and re-evaluation. In such processes, theoretical construction and model modification can come about, leading to further dissemination and ongoing modification as working models are implemented in the diverse theatres that may benefit through the adoption and adaptation of tested sport-based, peace-oriented conflict resolution programmes. Thus, in the end, providing opportunities for ongoing critical reflection and model refinement can enhance not only our theory construction and research strategies, but advance our goals with practical interventions that may help sport play a role in saving the world.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.