Sports: A Tool For Development & Peace Building

By Vositha Wijenayake –April 6, 2016

Vositha Wijenayake

Sport has long being recognised as a tool for peace promotion. Its disregard for borders across nations, and the ability to bring together societies has enabled sports to play a significant role in promoting social integration, and economic development. Sport is also a powerful tool to address many issues of the society, including the promotion of peace and development. Having the capacity to strengthen social ties and networks, promote ideals of peace, fraternity, solidarity, non-violence, tolerance and justice, sport could further provide avenues to address issues in post conflict situations, and bring create solidarity among different peoples.

Sport: a Tool for Peace-building

Professor John Paul Lederach, the well-known conflict resolution scholar defines the concept of peace-building as a comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates and sustains the full array of processes, approaches and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationship.

This points to the need for building strong interpersonal and inter-group relations throughout society. It also highlights the need for attention being allocated to the role that the civil society and all stake holders plays in the peace building process. Peace building is not limited to one actor, and it success is to be achieved, it needs to be a multi-actor driven process which is holistic. This applies the same to sports, sports should not be the only approach, but one of the means and the tools to achieve peace building.

Sport for Integration

Sport has the ability to create an environment in which there is the possibility of bringing people together which would in turn make it possible to work towards the same goal. It also allows to develop respect to one another, share space and equipment.

Studies on fostering social integration show that there are many factors that contribute to the use of sport being successful in bringing about exchange and building relationships between different groups. This includes sport as a non-verbal means of communication where groups are not able to communicate in the same language, and sport as a means to engage in collective experience which allows direct physical contact. It has also noted sport’s ability to transcend class divisions.

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