Introduction: Theorizing the History of Sport-for-Development

Abstract

The high profile of sport-for-development programs in the early twenty-first century, emphasized by the support of the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee, and corporate social responsibility, has suggested that such initiatives are a relatively recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, the use of sport to achieve social, economic, and moral ends—“sport-for-good”—has a long history. From the colonial period to the current neoliberal era, sport and physical activity have been used as a development tool both because sport is so frequently positioned as apolitical and non-threatening and because it is understood to have universal, transnational, and transhistorical meanings. This book considers the historical context in which sport has been organized and deployed as a means of development, by examining the intersections between the history of sport and the history of development. This chapter sketches out the landscape of contemporary sport-for-development scholarship and outlines the ways in which this argument is pursued in the chapters that follow.