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The democratically elected President of Liberia was between 1997 and 2004 also the country’s ‘Chief Patron of Sport’. Enjoying tennis more than team games, the one-time President, Charles Taylor, realized that the electorate’s enthusiasm for the game of football meant that the game could be a useful vehicle with which to associate. As well as funding the salaries of the national ‘Lone Star’ football team, Taylor also sponsored a football team in the national league drawn from his personal militia known as the ‘Anti-Terrorist Unit’ (ATU). Prone to random murder by night, the same players, out of their recognizable uniform and in match kit, respected the rules of the game and the position of the referee. Others seeking the same sporting enjoyment were, when on the field of play in 2003, captured and forced to join the Presidential militia when rebel forces sought to overthrow Taylor. Players of another team – mainly children – were killed mid-match when a rocket-propelled grenade – origins contested – landed in their midst. The Liberian nation’s most famous citizen and one-time FIFA World Footballer of the Year, George Weah, twice fled the country in terror, once when threatened by the forces of the President, and again years later when an angry mob of irate football supporters blamed him for their national football team’s failure to qualify for the World Cup Finals. There was no shortage of incidents in Liberia in the aforementioned years that could be classed as ‘terrorist’ and indeed terrifying; sporting practice at times exemplified the alternatives available to conflict, yet at other times it accentuated the fault lines in what BBC political journalist Fergal Keane famously called Africa’s ‘basket case’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A nation's politics and socio-cultural identity can sometimes be best considered through the lens of Association Football (soccer). Examining football in the Mediterranean island of Malta in the inter-war years of 1920-1940 this paper focuses its analysis on the phenomenon that is the game of football and the epi-phenomena it provokes and sustains. In the tiny archipelago that constitutes the Maltese islands, the game as it was played and administered in this era had implications for the British colonialists, the refugees that fled Central Europe for Maltese shores and the indigenous Maltese peoples. In these years the game was played out amidst, variously, the island's unique party politics, intra-district rivalries, and historical considerations of reputation and social class. It was also to become integral to the contestations around anti-colonial sentiment and the debates over national identity. The game in Malta was thus a facilitator of both local and global processes and played an understated role in the pursuit of independence. This examination of the specific Maltese context may well shed light upon broader processes within the international game which lies at the intersection of the global and the local. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role and contribution of peacemaking to the wider sport, development and peace (sdp) sector. Particular attention is paid to a hitherto under-explored subject: the complex position of the military vis-a-vis sport and sport-related peacekeeping. Through an historical overview of the sport-military intersection, reference to fieldwork in Bosnia and Liberia, and a brief examination of the Conseil Internationale du Sport Militaire, some critical and cautious conclusions are put forth. We suggest that sport-based peacemaking interventions provide the military with a new kind of institutional function, and fresh ways of building positive social links to civilian populations. However, such engagement is only possible if full dialogical engagement between civilians and peacekeeping forces is established, in which the military adapt their practices to suit the local cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the ???African Personality??? was celebrated by the continent's first post-colonial President, Kwame Nkrumah. Sweeping to power in Ghana's first general election in 1951, Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party???inspired by Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois???espoused the doctrines of nationhood and self-reliance. The conceptual dimensions of Nkrumah's ???African Personality??? and the role he had in mind for Association Football (soccer) as an instrument of its expression are crucial points of this analysis. Here we attempt to locate Nkrumah's political ideal within the contemporary realities of the migration of young Ghanaian soccer talent, examining at the same time the socio-economic processes which act as ???push??? and ???pull??? mechanisms in the context of such migratory trends. While Nkrumah's ???race-conscious,??? pan-African forces have been utilized in the face of post-colonial identifications, soccer loyalties and objectives which are far more immediate and parochial in character continue to supersede those surrounding national or ???racial??? interests. Ghana's domestic game and national selection are riven by ethnic and regional hostilities while interlopers from Europe???some acting alone, others as emissaries for European soccer clubs???have laid down roots in Ghana, recognizing the nation as a breeding ground for talented, and comparatively cheap, young soccer talent. We argue that such inveterate ethno-regional rivalries, along with the conditions of neoliberal capitalism and its instrumental system of uneven geographical development, have provided entry points for the post-colonial forces so maligned by Nkrumah. Furthermore, we question the wisdom of notions of belonging based on bounded units such as ???race??? and attendant expressions of ???race-consciousness.??? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In January 2007, English international soccer star David Beckham announced to a global media that he would be leaving the Spanish giants Real Madrid to join Major League Soccer's (MLS) Los Angeles Galaxy. MLS Commissioner Don Garber feted Beckham as a global sporting icon whose presence attested to America's gradual transformation into a 'Soccer Nation.' However, following LA Galaxy's acquisition, a debate surrounding soccer's previous failure to compete at the highest echelons of American professional sport reappeared. Academic and journalistic commentators identified a number of obstacles—historical, socioeconomic and ideological—that have prevented soccer from gaining a foothold in the United States sporting market and therein becoming a credible adversary to the holy trinity of Gridiron Football, Baseball, and Basketball. This article, drawing upon Ian Hacking's prescriptions for Historical Ontology (2002) and thereby foregrounding issues of identity and power, seeks to analyse the impediments that have marked soccer's development in the United States and that led to the recruitment of Beckham as the sporting celebrity-cum-commercial juggernaut intended to bring MLS to the attention of a mass audience—variegated in terms of class, 'race,' and gender—so coveted by leaders of the organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]