FranceAndUS: Sports and Diplomacy Hiding in Plain Sight
Sport can promote diplomacy, even between kindred democracies.
For more than a century, different types of sports diplomacy have fostered stronger relations between the United States and its oldest ally, France.
Although the cultural endeavors of food, fashion, or film drive public consciousness of citizen interactions, the French and American sports story hides in plain sight. Today sports serve as one of the more democratic milieus in both societies, thus sports diplomacy between these two countries is an instructive example of how this prism exhibits the intersection of sport and democracy.
Read more via “FranceAndUS: Sports and Diplomacy Hiding in Plain Sight” by Carole Ponchon and Lindsay Krasnoff in SportandDev.org
Sport Diplomacy: So what is it?
Sport Diplomacy is how we explain the intersection of the diplomatic realm with the sporting one and the subsequent formation of evolving networks
Contributed By Dr. J. Simon Rofe.
Definition: Sport Diplomacy is how we explain the intersection of the diplomatic realm with the sporting one and the subsequent formation of evolving networks.
It offers, under the premise of the three core characteristics of diplomacy: representation, negotiation, and communication, a conceptual understanding of sport that 1) provides the navigation skills for practitioners to connect with and learn from different parts of the sport diplomacy ecosystem; and 2) helps provide critical reflection for policy makers and practitioners, and scholars, to enhance their practice in these overlapping and conjoined spaces. (Rofe, 2019)
Nelson Mandela said in 2000, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.” Anyone who has shared in sport’s capacity to heighten emotions with the scoring of a goal, the winning of a race or the triumph over an opponent will recognize the “power” that Mandela acknowledged. In essence Sport has an ability to communicate with vast number and variety of people–and hence facilitate diplomacy.
Why does Sport Diplomacy matter? Sport Diplomacy, or the sport diplomatique, explains the coming together of Representation, Communication and Negotiation–facets of Global Diplomacy–played out through sport as a feature of contemporary society of the past one hundred and fifty years that touches vast numbers of the world’s population either through participation or spectatorship.
Sport has the power to shape the world through diplomatic transactions between not only nation states, but a raft of other actors on a global stage including international sporting bodies such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Special Olympics (SO); non-governmental organisations such as International Sporting Federations; media partners with national, regional and global interests; athletes themselves as potential sporting ‘diplomats’; and business interests that make any Sporting-Mega Event a multi-million pound enterprise. All of this is observed, dissected and recycled by a phalanx of commentators facilitated by twenty first century social media for a global audience. Sport replicates and exemplifies the prevalence of non-state actors and people-to-people [exchanges], which means in this latest iteration of ‘new diplomacy’, private citizens like athletes to play informal diplomatic roles.
The messages that sport carries are rarely singular; and that it can speak to so many different audiences is why it requires the careful decoding and analysis that we can provide.
Dr. J. Simon Rofe is the Global Diplomacy Programme Director and Reader in Diplomatic and International Studies at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London. Co-Director of the Basketball Diplomacy in Africa Oral History Project, Dr. Rofe’s work has helped build out the sports diplomacy field, both its theory and practice.