This volume of wide-ranging essays by sport historians and sociologists examines the complex relations of war, peace and sport through a series of case studies from South and North America, Europe, North Africa, Asia and New Zealand.
From formal military training in the late nineteenth century to contemporary esports, the relationship between military and sporting cultures has endured across nations in times of conflict and peace. This collection contextualizes debates around the morality and desirability of continuing to play sport against the backdrop of war as others are dying for their nation. It also examines the legacy and memory of particular wars as expressed in a range of sporting practices in the immediate aftermath of conflicts such as the World Wars and wars of independence. At the same time, this book analyses the history of sport and peace by considering how sport can operate as a pacification in some contexts and a tool of reconciliation in others.
Together, and through an introductory framing essay, these essays offer scholars of sport, conflict studies and cultural history more broadly a multinational analysis of the war-peace-sport nexus that has operated throughout the world since the late nineteenth century.
Author(s): Martin Hurcombe, Philip Dine
Series: Routledge Studies in Cultural History, 139
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 382
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Contributors
Preface
Introduction: Exploring the War-Peace-Sport Nexus
PART I: Military and Sporting Cultures
1. Boars as Rebels: Pig-Sticking as a Military Sport for the British Army in India
2. Reporting the Death of Cycling’s Elite in First World War France
3. Women, War and Sport: The Battle of the 2019 Solheim Cup
4. Sport Plus the Shooting: Military Vision and the Logic of War in Esports
PART II: Play On: Negotiating Sporting Practice in a Time of Conflict
5. ‘You Are Absolutely Indifferent to the Call of Your King’: Horse Racing, War and Politics in New Zealand, 1914–1918
6. ‘Flannelled Fools Are Strutting About Tennis Courts’: Lawn Tennis in Britain During the Great War
7. Occupied Scandinavian Brother Nations: Danish and Norwegian Sports During World War Two
8. The General’s Vuelta: Cycling and Dictatorship during Colombia’s La Violencia, 1953–1958
PART III: Sports Culture and the Legacy of War
9. ‘What Demobilised Men Want’: Physical Culture and Post-War British Masculinity
10. The ‘Great Game’ and Sport: Identity, Contestation and Irish-British Relations in the Olympic Movement
11. The Pathos of the Soldier-Athlete in Japanese Memories of the Asia-Pacific War
12. Remembering ‘Our Boys’: Football, War and Masculinity in the British Military Spectacular
PART IV: Playing for Peace: Cultural Diplomacy or Pacification?
13. Overcoming Antipathy for Internationalism?: Britain and the 1920 Olympic Games
14. War and Sport in ‘French’ Algeria: From Pacification to Decolonization
15. ‘A Fine Example of Brotherhood and Sportsmanship’: The 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games in the Era of the ‘Little Détente’
16. Replacing Bullets with Balls: Sport for Peace in the FARC Demobilization and Reincorporation Camps
Index
