Football as a terrain of hope and struggle: beginning a dialogue on social change, hope and building a better world through sport

Abstract

From diplomats and politicians, to the executives of sports governing bodies and non-governmental development agencies, to grassroots activists, sport – particularly football – is invariably invoked as an object of hope and a vehicle for building a better world. However, how hope is conceived by these various actors and institutions, and the better world that they imagine is often left unexamined. The purpose of this paper, a collaboration between a researcher interested in sport for development and peace and an activist involved in South African social movements and community football, is to begin an exploration of different understandings of hope and social change in relation to sport. Our aim is to demonstrate that reorienting discussions around how social change is conceptualised in different ways can result in critical understandings of how sport is currently being mobilised in various ways to affect change, and the potential alternatives that are being overlooked.

Keywords:

• Sport for development and peace
• social movements
• social change
• hope
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the guest editors for their input throughout the revision process and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive feedback. It contributed a great deal to our revisions and to producing this article.

Notes

1. Used interchangeably throughout the article.

2. As one of the reviewers pointed out, because Fanon has unfortunately not been engaged with in SDP literature it is important to acknowledge the most prominent, although arguably misplaced, critique of this work; that being, that his final book, Les Damnés de la Terre (translated as The Wretched/Damned of the Earth), equated struggle with violence and advocated for violence within decolonial struggles. As many scholars and biographers of Fanon have pointed out, his views around violence were much more nuanced than this (Sekyi-Otu 1996, Cherki, 2006, Gibson 2011, Gordon, 2015, Lee 2015). The book, finished at the age of 35, shortly before he died in 1961, was based largely on Fanon’s experiences as a psychiatrist working in France and Algeria, as well as his involvement in the Algerian struggle for liberation against France. It was from these experiences that Fanon became intimately acquainted with the violence that was embedded in colonial contexts, its impact on both colonisers and colonised and its political and psychological role in revolution. Similar to other revolutionaries at this time, Fanon understood the contextual factors contributing to the use of violence, but this does not mean that he universally endorsed or promoted it.

3. Reference to the work and thought of anti-apartheid leader Oliver Tambo. Tambo grew up in a rural area surrounded by the Engeli Mountains. For him, what was beyond these mountains represented a way to look forward, to envision the alternatives that existed to his present reality (Callinicos 2004).