Author Description

Sport continues to be conceptualised and valued in public and media discourse as something that is, or should be, pure and untainted by the pejoratively understood political, and continues to be framed by many opinion formers outside of academia as unserious fun, separate from the real world. This is in spite of universal acknowledgement in academic studies that sport is often at the heart of the political and that the political is often central to sport. From the Berlin Nazi Games, through civil rights activism in Mexico 68, the Cold War and apartheid boycotts, to civil unrest in Brazil in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup, sport and politics have been symbiotic bedfellows and remain so. The Routledge Handbook of Sport and Politics goes further than any other book in surveying the complex, embedded relationships between sport and politics. Divided into six sections addressing the study of sport and politics, ideologies, nation and statehood, corporate politics, political activism and social justice, and the politics of sports events, the book covers key sporting and political moments, introduces the conceptual foundations that underpin our understanding of the politics of sport and politics in sport, and examines the full range of established, emergent and residual issues at the heart of the sport and politics nexus. With contributions from leading international scholars, and including cases and source material from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, this is an essential reference for anybody with an interest in the social scientific study of sport.