Sport is currently mobilized as a tool of international development within the “Sport for Development and Peace” (SDP) movement. Framed by Gramscian hegemony theory and sport and development studies respectively, this article offers an analysis of the conceptualization of sport’s social and political utility within SDP programs. Drawing on the perspectives of young Canadians (n = 27) who served as volunteer interns within Commonwealth Games Canada’s International Development through Sport program, the dominant ideologies of development and social change that underpin current SDP practices are investigated. The results suggest that while sport does offer a new and unique tool that successfully aligns with a development mandate, the logic of sport is also compatible with the hegemony of neo-liberal development philosophy. As a result, careful consideration of the social politics of sport and development within the SDP movement is called for.
This article analyzes young Canadian volunteer interns' encounters with sociocultural difference within the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) movement. Using Foucauldian bio-power, Third Wave, or transnational feminism and Hardt and Negri's Empire, it examines how interns interpreted difference as markers of underdevelopment which secured the focus of the SDP movement on the underdevelopment of others. Following the Empire framework, this bio-political regulation centered on the corporeal and the somatic, key elements of the sporting experience, and drew on social interpretations of race and its intersections with gender and class. While interns offered some critical perspectives, the results corroborate recent analyses of international development in which neoliberal logic sustains the focus of development on the "conduct of conduct" and largely at the expense of attending to broader issues of inequality.
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