Much attention has been paid in recent years to the mobilization of sport to meet international development goals through the ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ (SDP) sector. Research has not only documented important contributions made by and through SDP, but also drawn attention to important limitations of such programmes and policies. In this paper, I aim to contribute to this literature by investigating the construction of cultural knowledge of SDP within the popular magazine Sports Illustrated and the political implications thereof. Employing the theoretical tradition of Edward Said, I suggest that popular representations of sport in SDP can serve to secure the innocence and benevolence of global sport for western audiences while insulating them from, and therefore solidifying, the political economy of unequal development. As a result, SDP remains amenable to the politics of Empire in the new millennium.
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Simon C. Darnell (2013) studied this question.
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