Sport, Race, and Bio-Politics: Encounters With Difference in “Sport for Development and Peace” Internships

Abstract

This article analyzes young Canadian volunteer interns’ encounters with sociocultural difference within the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) movement. Using Foucauldian bio-power, Third Wave, or transnational feminism and Hardt and Negri’s Empire, it examines how interns interpreted difference as markers of underdevelopment which secured the focus of the SDP movement on the underdevelopment of others. Following the Empire framework, this bio-political regulation centered on the corporeal and the somatic, key elements of the sporting experience, and drew on social interpretations of race and its intersections with gender and class. While interns offered some critical perspectives, the results corroborate recent analyses of international development in which neoliberal logic sustains the focus of development on the “conduct of conduct” and largely at the expense of attending to broader issues of inequality.