Mega-events such as the Olympic Games generate public diplomacy opportunities, exchanges through sport can conflate, cool or consolidate relations between nations and these days international sporting bodies are powerful diplomatic actors in their own right.
From London to Cuba to Beijing, this Special Issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy explores the means behind these myriad state and non-state networks: sports diplomacy. The Americans, Japanese and Germans are doing it, and even the Taliban turned out to watch the first cricket match between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
If done correctly sports diplomacy alters billions of public perceptions, create dynamic and alternate diplomatic pathways and, more often than war, trade and development, moves people and nations beyond the negotiation table, uniting the estranged and disparate through a mutual love of the game — of sport.
Guest editor: Stuart Murray