Sport in the Age of Geopolitical Crisis

(21-22 March 2024)

The Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh is pleased to announce that we will host the 2024 Political Studies Association (PSA) Sport and Politics Specialist Group annual conference on 21-22 March. The theme of this conference is “Sport in the Age of Geopolitical Crisis”. The neoliberal international order has been facing challenges from several fronts, and this situation is escalating the level of conflict in different regions. The recent wars in Ukraine and Israel and the military tensions in the South China Sea represent the current world politics in flux. Sport is, by no means, immune to such a political climate. 2024 is the year of the Summer Olympic Games, and the IOC is still debating the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes in Paris 2024. The Chinese city of Hangzhou has recently hosted the Asian Games, and through this event, China demonstrated its sporting and technological might to its continental neighbours. Saudi Arabia has been exploiting sport as a means of accumulating its soft power assets, and the presence of the Saudi Pro League and the LIV Golf in the global sport industry is causing some strain on the established sporting markets in the West. At this juncture, the 2024 PSA Sport and Politics Group conference invites abstracts that discuss the connections between sport and cultural, national, regional, and global politics from several different perspectives. We welcome an abstract from any social sciences and humanities disciplines.

Possible themes include but are not limited to;

- Sport, diplomacy and international relations

- Sport, international development and peace

- Sport, statehood and nationalism

- Sport and religious fundamentalism

- Sport and (post) colonialism - Sport and “culture war”

- Sport and green politics

- Sport and gender politics

- Sport and racial politics

- Sport and human rights

- Politics of (non) major sporting events

- Sport and political protest

- International and national sport governance

- Sport and global north and south divide

- Sport and political symbolism

- Sport, regimes, and political ideology

Please submit your abstract (250 words maximum) to https://forms.office.com/e/2re0ZA9Kr2 by 17.00 (GMT) on 20 December 2023.