Who had it right? Was it George Orwell who called sports “war minus the shooting”, or Nelson Mandela who said that sports can “create hope where once there was only despair.” The answer turns on the empirical record and a deeper truth: sports and politics brings together two of the great undertakings of human society. Accordingly, sports on the international stage deserves serious scholarly consideration. 2026 is a banner year for international sports mega events. February’s Winter Olympics, held in Italy, and the FIFA World Cup, held across North America in June and July, anchor the international sporting calendar. At the same time, world politics is on a knife’s edge. Simply put, sports is a lens through which classic concerns of International Relations and political science are refracted.

Let’s start with the grandest concern of them all: world peace. Any speech from a FIFA or IOC president would be incomplete without pieties about the unifying power of sport. These claims draw upon the ancient Greek idea of ekecheiria – an Olympic truce – the idea that warring factions would lay down their arms during the games. In actuality, the Olympic truce only meant safe passage for travellers, not a ceasefire. At best, the spirit of a sporting truce has a mixed record. Yes, ping pong diplomacy facilitated US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s, and yes, North Korea and South Korea marched under a unified flag in the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. But any good example is easily parried by a negative one. There is the 1969 Soccer War between El Salvador and Honduras, a simmering conflict that was inflamed by rioting during World Cup qualifying matches. Duelling Olympic boycotts by the US and Soviet Union in 1980 and 1984 were certainly not consistent with the spirit of truce, nor were the “vicious passions” observed by Orwell during the Soviet Dynamo tour of England in 1945. The notion that sports was politics by other means became a widely accepted trope during the Cold War and still is today.

Of course, no sports impresario has ever let history get in the way of a good story. But, like second marriages, the supposed unifying power of sport and the Olympic truce represent the triumph of hope over experience. Realists would certainly eschew any optimistic assumptions about human nature or the structural incentives of anarchy. the world. Liberals may place more faith in the harmony of interests or common international norms and institutions. The debate continues.

If world peace is unlikely to be achieved through sport, plenty of other political objectives are in play. Chief among them is the great standby of political modernity: nationalism. Few things rouse the national sentiment more than having all eyes on you, as a national contingent in the parade of nations, as a host country, or both. Similarly, sports mega events are major vehicles for soft power exertion on the world stage. Host cities in wealthy countries can preen and peacock in a bid for international prestige. Other countries, through hosting or competitive success, can announce their return to respectability, as was the case with Japan’s Olympics in 1964, or matriculation to the ranks of the great powers, as China did in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. In the 1880s and 1890s, the US announced its early emergence on the world stage, in part, through sports diplomacy initiatives across Asia and Europe.

Post-colonial countries in the developing world can demonstrate their independence and capabilities independence and........

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