Sport and Peace-Building in Divided Societies

Playing with Enemies

John Sugden, Alan Tomlinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781136292330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sport is a cultural institution that stands at the interface between political and civil society. In divided communities, sport has been an agent of separation, sectarian hatred and violence, but also a highly effective tool for conflict resolution, reconciliation and peace-building.

In this important study, John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson draw on their extensive international experience of working with divided communities to develop a methodological and theoretical model for peace-building in sport. The book showcases original case studies from three regions of the world in which sport has played a prominent role in social deconstruction and reconstruction: Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and South Africa. Combining a wealth of primary and secondary data, the authors chart the rise of the contemporary Sport for Development and Peace movement (SDP) and outline an important new practice-based framework for understanding, researching and working to achieve positive social change in the SDP sector.

This is essential reading for any student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in the sociology of sport, sport development, international development, peace studies or conflict resolution.

Chapter 1
The question?

It can sometimes be hard to identify exactly where and when the inspiration for a book comes from. Not so in this case. While the data that feed into the following pages have been gleaned from a wide range of experiences and informed by a multitude of primary and secondary sources, the idea for the book itself derives from a simple question that was asked by Dominic Malcolm, fellow sport sociologist, during a staff and graduate seminar at the University of Loughborough in 2006, in which John Sugden reflected upon the role that he had played in establishing and developing the sub-field of Sport for Development and Peace (SDP). At the end of the presentation, a familiar range of questions was asked, particularly concerned with technical/logistical, funding, safety and related security issues. Once the research students had finished their interrogations, Dr. Malcolm raised his hand and asked, “What difference does the fact that you are a sociologist make to your leadership and development of projects like this?”

‘What an outstanding question’! I thought, as I then ad libbed, stumbling and stuttering through what, on reflection, was at best a vague and incomplete answer; but at the same time, replying: “Of course it makes a difference, in as much as being a sociologist isn’t just a job, it’s more a vocation, a way of life, and as such as a sociologist everything you see and do stimulates and is filtered through and activated by your trained sociological imagination”. This was an implicit acknowledgement of the significant influence that the American sociologist C. Wright Mills had on my own development as a sociologist and activist.¹ This being the case, inevitably the evolution of our approaches to SDP and interpretation of that experience has been and continues to be heavily influenced by a particular model of the “sociological imagination”. While at the time this answer seemed to satisfy the audience, on reflection later it became clear that the simple questions demand the most complex answers. In the intervening years since the Loughborough seminar seeking a satisfactory answer to Dr. Malcolm’s question has been a recurrent concern. What follows in this book provides the more complete – both evidenced and theorised – answer that his perceptive and challenging question deserves.

Having said this, the original answer was by no means completely offthe-mark, and was in fact a compass point for what follows: that all of the sport-based, community activism over more than three decades has been influenced by a particular sociological gaze, one framed not just by the corpus of sociological knowledge absorbed during an intellectual journey through Higher Education as both student and academic, but equally importantly by the places where as a sociologist one has lived, by the experiences encountered in the world of SDP and beyond, and by the many influential people (both academic and lay) engaged with along the way. This book is based on the interpretive juxtaposition between the lived and theoretical hemispheres of the SDP globe as dwelt in and scrutinised for the past three decades. For reasons made clear in the foreword this is not exactly the book that was originally planned. While neither an auto-ethnography nor a biography, John’s near-death experience and subsequent convalescence has led us to produce a professional narrative spiced by memoir, lived experience and interpretive immersion in the subject contexts. This has produced both a much more self-reflective account, and a more grounded theoretical analysis, than might have otherwise been the case.

Nonetheless in adopting such an approach, one must be very conscious of the need to guard against allowing self-reflection to turn into self-indulgence. With this in mind the ‘telling of tales’ has been restricted to events and circumstances shaping and defining a direction towards the study of sport, conflict-resolution and peace-building, a field that became one of the domain concerns of the Brighton research agenda, constituting a founding contribution to the creation of SDP as a sub-field within the sociology of sport. In this comparatively new area of academic inquiry this contribution, as the narrative in the following pages reaffirms, has been to take as a lead the ‘P’ component of the acronym, that is to give priority to the conflict-resolution and peace-building dimensions of SDP.² At the heart of this contribution, too, has been a concern with practical and intellectual/philosophical objectives and outcomes. While there have been more generic development goals and outcomes associated with the work in sport and peace-building it is the use of sport to promote conflict-resolution and co-existence that we believe to be the most distinctive and significant contribution to the field. In doing this, bringing the researcher’s phenomenological presence into play alongside the critical sociological gaze has been a means of recognising the agency of the researcher, and this has consistently informed the developing work concerning the relationships and tensions between the practice-based and theoretically orientated dimensions of the personal SDP expedition.

As such, this is not a definitive and comprehensive text that reviews and synthesises all that is known and has been written about SDP, nor is this book a wholly conventional research monograph, but it is purposely designed to be of interest and use to the academic community. Even more importantly, it is designed to be accessible to a wider audience, particularly those activists and policy makers who are practically engaged at different levels of the SDP world. Which is why, with the publisher’s indulgence, the book is written and presented as a narrative, with footnoted attributions limited to the most relevant sources and those whose work directly informs the telling of this tale. In doing this a life in SDP is shown to have consistently interacted with a maturing sociological imagination, so informing a distinctive approach to civil society activism in the world of sport for development and peace. The primary aim of the book remains, though, to produce a plausible theory and method for SDP work that can be easily understood, implemented and further developed in a multitude of different settings around the world.

The book articulates an answer to ‘The Question’ by comparing and contrasting case studies in three regions which have long histories of deep social division and socio-political violence, and which are or have been experiencing, at different stages of progress, so-called ‘peace processes’: Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Africa. These regions have been selected for a number of overlapping reasons: with the possible exception of the Balkan countries that used to be part of the former Yugoslavia, not only are they the sites of the most high-profile and enduring racial/ethno-religious conflicts of the modern era, they are also all societies within which peace processes feature prominently and in which, to borrow Eric Dunning’s phrase, ‘sport matters’.³ They have also been singled out because they are all places where we have either lived or spent extended periods of time. I lived and worked in Northern Ireland from 1983 until 1996 and from 2001–2012 spent extended periods of time engaged in sport-focused co-existence projects and programmes in Israel, Jordan and Palestine. While I have spent less time in South Africa, in 1996 shortly after the fall of apartheid Alan Tomlinson and I were in Johannesburg and Durban for the duration of association football’s African Cup of Nations and we have visited the country on numerous occasions since, including nine weeks in the field gathering material for FIFA: The Men, the Myths and the Money (Tomlinson, 2014) and for this book, in 2010 and 2012 respectively.⁴ Furthermore, given the role played by sport in the dis-establishment and reformation of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, to write a book about sport and peace-building that did not feature South Africa would have been an unjustifiable omission.

These case studies form Chapters 2, 3 and 4 and, alongside our parallel intellectual trajectories, provide the experiential core of the book. The later chapters review the wider context of the field, considering critically the key features of the SDP ‘movement’ and arguing that its recent growth has suggested a journey towards institutionalisation and ossification; and they reflect back on the case studies to outline the most prominent lessons that have been learned in journeying through the world of SDP. We argue how, under carefully constructed and managed circumstances, with modest, pragmatic and incremental goals, sport can be used as a vehicle to carry and inculcate the values upon which better lives can be built. The main features of ‘the ripple effect’ model, a praxis-based heuristic designed to help guide political engagement and civil society activism in this sphere, are evaluated in the final chapter. But to begin with we need to go in search of the roots of the sociological imagination that we believe is best fitted to the journey that has framed and informed this book’s narrative.

‘When I was in the Sudan …’: a quest for the sociological imagination

Before ‘gap years’ had become the flavour of the day, John was in the Sudan as a volunteer teacher in a postgraduate year after leaving the University of Essex with a modest degree result in Government and Sociology and a stellar triple honours in political protest, socialising and sport (not necessarily in that order). Graduate jobs were scarce then, in the mid-1970s, particularly for those of us with degrees in the social sciences and the humanities. As a default, after university many graduates opted for careers in secondary education, social services or the prison and probation services. I felt that the world had more to offer than Please Sir? or Porridge and I was determined not to follow any of the default options.⁵ After three months working as a full-time barman in the Royal Oak, a pub in Harlesden, north London, serving pints of Guinness to thirsty London-Irish labourers, my resolve faltered and I was about to begin work as a rookie social worker in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets; but three weeks before I was scheduled to start my new job I was browsing through the situation vacant pages of The Guardian newspaper when my eye was caught by a small, almost deliberately vague, advertisement for volunteer teachers to work, for local wages only, teaching English for the Ministry for Education in the Sudan.⁶ Except that it was somewhere in Africa, I was not even sure where the Sudan was. I decided to apply anyway and against all odds, or so it seemed, after a hurried interview somewhere in West London was offered a position. Three weeks later, with little or no time to think through the consequences of this career move and post-colonial adventure, I found myself alongside a dozen or so fellow volunteers sweltering on the baking tarmac at Khartoum’s International Airport.

Sudan has a classic post-colonial shape, its boundaries having been drawn more or less in straight lines during the nineteenth-century’s “scramble for Africa”.⁷ At that time, regardless of traditional tribal and ethnic regional distinctions and power relations, geographic borders would often be set in smoke-filled rooms in London, Brussels, Paris or Berlin when the armies of one European power would bump into those of another as they sought to extend the boundaries of their African Empires. Which is why, since its independence in 1956, the Republic of Sudan, has been blighted by internal tribal conflicts and protracted civil war between the Arab-dominated North and the African South. This conflict seemed to be finally resolved in 2011 when the Southern part of the country was granted independence, although tensions between the Sudan (North) and its nearest and newest neighbour remained high, particularly in the districts closest to the border where the region’s copious oil reserves can be found, while in Darfur, in the North, rebels and Government-sponsored militia continue to fight it out, bringing devastation and death to local populations; and, as we write, civil war continues to rage in the South.

But all that was still in the future when a group of hopeful though apprehensive young volunteers was led through the airport and onto a waiting bus which took us all to the Ministry of Education where we would be assigned to our different schools. After the briefest of inductions I was deployed to an ex-colonial boarding school in a town called El Obeid in the west of the sprawling country. It was the rainy season and in the absence of any useable roads, this involved another flight in a small plane to cover the 300 miles between Khartoum and El Obeid. This was hardly a journey to the dreaming spires or to a cloistered idyll of a college campus comprising welcoming quads, gothic spires and green fields. The School, Khor Taggart, was a barracks-like relic of the British Empire, by whom the country had been ruled in association with Egypt until 1958. It was one of only a handful of boys’ secondary schools in the whole country. The school that was to be a home and place of work for ten months sat in an area of scrub-land and semi-desert surrounded by a scattering of mud-hut villages about five miles away from the main town. At this time I had never taught a day in my life and was naïvely expecting a period of training and induction, not just a cursory briefing at the airport. I was wrong, as it turned out the next day when greeted by a regal, olive-skinned headmaster, dressed in a flowing starched-white jelabia, – the preferred, cooling, shift-like robe of Arab men in the ferocious heat of North Africa – “Welcome”, he boomed, thrusting a time-table into the hands of this pedagogic neophyte, wishing him luck as he was sent straight in to a debut teaching lesson.

Minutes later, I found myself standing nervously in front of a classroom of 30 or more 16-year-old boys dressed in battleship-grey short-sleeve shirts and shorts eagerly awaiting me to lead them through an English GCE O Level literature syllabus that included Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. I could speak no Arabic and my pupils could speak very little English. We, the pupils and I, and the family of huge, double-bodied, Nile wasps that had nests in the corner of my classroom, got on famously. Suffice to say the days ahead were extremely challenging but I managed to survive without doing too much damage to the intellectual development of my charges. I even might have taught one or two of them how to write and speak English a little better – albeit with a Liverpool twang. In my spare time, helped by local teachers, I was able to explore the surrounding villages and during brief periods of leave venture further afield to explore what at the time, and right up to the 2011 partition, was Africa’s largest and poorest country. My travels took me deep into the war-torn and lawless south of the country where I came face-to-face with dignified nomadic tribespeople, living amid grinding poverty, exacerbated by the terror tactics wielded by rebel and government forces.

The whole experience was quite a shock for the recent hedonistic undergraduate. To help the months of relative isolation pass, at the school I got involved with the boys’ extracurricular sporting activities. The Empire had left behind a pair of rusting goalposts bestriding a dirt football pitch and an open-air basketball court with a dim floodlight and two naked basketball hoops. Here in the late afternoons and early evenings I’d join in with the boys, helping them with their football technique when I could, but more often, particularly in the case of basketball, picking up tips from them.

Before leaving London, hurriedly packing more in hope than expectation, I had thrust a pair of training shoes and a brand-new pair of football boots into my backpack. This later turned me into a celebrity among the schoolboys as most played barefoot and only the better senior boys, who played for the school team in the very occasional interscholastic football match, had boots. These tended to be imperial antiques, the stiff leather, high-ankle, studs-nailed-in kind that I remember my father playing in when I was a primary schoolboy in the early-to-mid 1950s. My moulded sole, soft leather Mitres became the talk of the town where I would go to train with and play once a week for one of the local teams, Al Hilal (crescent moon) in the city of El Obeid. Each time I made the journey into town, bouncing along the dirt track on a bench in the back of the school’s old army truck, I would stop off at an open-air cafe on the main street for a cooling iced-lemon drink. A hoard of ragged, impoverished, shoe-shine boys would descend on the truck, competing noisily for the honour of cleaning my envied and glorified football boots. The normal rate for a shoeshine was a Sudanese penny, but I would give a shilling to the one anointed for the task. No wonder I almost caused a riot every time I came to town! I have never had cleaner boots before or since. When it came time for me to leave my post, I offered my gleaming boots to Khalifa, the captain of the school’s sen...