Sport for Development and Peace by Simon Darnell

Author:Simon Darnell [Darnell, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation, Sociology of Sports, Social Science, Developing & Emerging Countries, Business Aspects
ISBN: 9781849665902
Google: pl3IZPaYEJgC
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2012-03-15T04:01:04+00:00

The bio-politics of SDP

In lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault (2008) argued that the increasing entrenchment of bio-politics emerged from a particular political economy, one in which the state wielded less and less direct control over citizens and in which the market increasingly took on a measure of irrefutability. The governing of the populace was led, via the political economy, to the market in such a way as to ‘uncover’ the intelligibility of the truth of governmental practice. Bio-politics and governmentality, as constituted through the production and regulation of bodies and securing of conduct, were therefore an appropriate response to the conundrum of how to structure the exercise of power while still respecting the truths of the market. In Foucauldian terms, this was not constitutive of a social or political conspiracy but rather the ‘logic’ of social and political organization.

Two implications for the current political organization of SDP proceed from this understanding. One, the application and mobilization of sport to meeting development goals is not, and cannot be, an apolitical activity given that the logic of securing social change, particularly along the axes of the body and subjectivity, proceeds from the particularities of the political economy. As discussed, this political economy in the twenty-first century continues to be one in which the state is regularly and routinely impoverished or disparaged, and/or in which market logic retains a hegemonic status in policy and practice. The universality of sport does not result in SDP being free of these political implications. There is little or no political terrain in which SDP could be mobilized that would transcend the bio-political implications to which Foucault drew attention. Even the most ostensibly supportive, politically non-threatening or seemingly benign understandings of social change in SDP regularly invoke the regulation of bodies and construction of preferred subjectivities in ways that secure a bio-political logic of neoliberalism. The entrenchment of such logic can be seen in the ways in which SDP officials like Julia describe the changes that they aim to secure through SFD.

Through our programme, we find that investing in ‘young people’ has a greater and more long-term impact, and I think one of the advantages of being a sport programme and a coaching programme is that people get involved because they want to and because they love to and because they are passionate already about what they do. We’re actually developing this whole cadre of really passionate, empowered, informed individuals who are then transferring their knowledge and who are sharing that knowledge and also being advocates on a regular basis for the people that they’re working with – Julia (SDP NGO).

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