1st Edition
Sport and the Pursuit of War and Peace from the Nineteenth Century to the Present War Minus the Shooting?
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.
Chapter 11 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by Tokyo University.
Introduction: Exploring the War-Peace-Sport Nexus
Martin Hurcombe and Philip Dine
Part 1: Military and Sporting Cultures
1. Boars as Rebels: Pig-Sticking as a Military Sport for the British Army in India
Piyush Kumar Tiwari
2. Reporting the Death of Cycling’s Elite in First World War France
Martin Hurcombe
3. Women, War and Sport: The Battle of the 2019 Solheim Cup
Ali Bowes, Alan Bairner, Stuart Whigham and Niamh Kitching
4. Sport Plus the Shooting: Military Vision and the Logic of War in Esports
Nathaniel Zetter
Part 2: 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, 1914-18
Greg Ryan
6. ‘Flannelled fools are strutting about tennis courts’: Lawn Tennis in Britain during the Great War
Robert J. Lake
7. Occupied Scandinavian Brother Nations: Danish and Norwegian Sports during World War II
Hans Bonde and Matti Goksøyr
8. The General’s Vuelta: Cycling and Dictatorship during Colombia’s La Violencia, 1953-1958
Manuel Morales Fontanilla
Part 3: Sports Culture and the Legacy of War
9. ‘What Demobilised Men Want’: Physical Culture and Post-War British Masculinity
Conor Heffernan
10. The ‘Great Game’ and Sport: Identity, Contestation and Irish-British Relations in the Olympic movement
Katie Liston and Joseph Maguire
11. The Pathos of the Soldier-Athlete in Japanese Memories of the Asia-Pacific War
Philip Seaton
12. Remembering ‘Our Boys’: Football, War and Masculinity in the British Military Spectacular
Daniel Fitzpatrick
Part 4: Playing for Peace: Cultural Diplomacy or Pacification?
13. Overcoming Antipathy for Internationalism? Britain and the 1920 Olympic Games
Luke J. Harris
14. War and Sport in ‘French’ Algeria: From Pacification to Decolonization
Philip Dine
15. ‘A Fine Example of Brotherhood and Sportsmanship’: The 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games in the Era of the ‘Little Détente’
Sam Schelfhout and Thomas M. Hunt
16. Replacing Bullets with Balls: Sport for Peace in the FARC Demobilization and Reincorporation Camps
Peter J. Watson
Biography
Martin Hurcombe is Professor of French Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He is a specialist in early twentieth-century French culture, history and politics and is the author of Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War (2004) and France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War Next Door, 1936–45 (2011). His most recent book, co-written with Martyn Cornick and Angela Kershaw, is French Political Travel Writing in the Inter-War Years: Radical Departures (2017). His current work explores the history of the French sports press and publication industry through its relationship to road cycling.
Philip Dine was formerly Personal Professor and Head of French at the University of Galway, Ireland. He has published widely on representations of the French colonial empire and its cultural legacies in fields ranging from children’s literature to professional sport. Further projects have targeted sport and identity-construction in France and the Francophone world. He is the author of Images of the Algerian War (1994), French Rugby Football: A Cultural History (2001) and Sport and Identity in France: Practices, Locations, Representations (2012). He is also the co-editor (with Seán Crosson) of Sport, Representation and Evolving Identities in Europe (2010).
