Human Rights Quarterly

The Ideals of Global Sport: From Peace to Human Rights explores whether international mega-sporting events, namely the Olympics and the men's World Cup, serve as catalyst for ideals such as peace and human rights, as many claim. The volume's contributors include historians, political scientists, and anthropologists from every continent but Antarctica who use sources in multiple languages. The volume offers strong, stand-alone chapters that also reference once another. Barbara J. Keys doubles as contributor and editor. Her two prior manuscripts focus on international sport and human rights, respectively.

The Ideals of Global Sport is divided into two sections. Part I: "The Core Ideals," interrogates some of "the most enduring idealistic claims associated with international sport:" friendship, antidiscrimination, peace, and democracy.¹

Simon Creak explores the notion that sporting contests "promote friendship and mutual understanding" by examining the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games. As Creak notes, friendship is not among the Olympic rules, but it has been part of the charter since the 1950s. Southeast Asian countries embraced these Olympic ideals in their own games, through which they have aimed to enhance friendship, "mutual understanding and cooperation."² Creak concludes that although the SEA Games have fostered interpersonal friendships among participants, these relationships have not impacted broader international friendships among the countries that participate.

Instead of friendship, Robert Skinner interrogates the relationship between the Olympic Charter's discrimination prohibition and the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) reluctance to deal with apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid contradicted the principles of "equality and universal opportunity" in international sport, and this paradox provided global anti-apartheid activists with a moral basis to call for cultural boycotts and isolation of South Africa.³ While the IOC balked at disciplining South Africa, activists and African states pushed for exclusion. Skinner argues that the eventual expulsion of South Africa happened not because sport aims to be anti-discriminatory, but due to "changes in global norms that shaped sport during the process of decolonization."⁴

Joon Seok Hong probes the relationship between democracy and the Olympic Games by focusing on the 1988 Seoul Summer Games. The Olympic Charter does not contain the word democracy; nor has the IOC attempted to promote "democracy as the preferred (or even aspirational) governing political ideology or set of political institutions in a bid or host country."⁵ While others have claimed [End Page 234] the Olympics' spotlight on South Korea pushed the country's peaceful move from dictatorship, Hong disputes the notion. Instead, the Olympics "amplified multiple unifying factors" both internationally and domestically that brought the country together over the seven-year preparatory process for the Games. As Hong asserts, "South Korea democratized not because of the Olympics but in spite of them."⁶

Roland Burke, in the final contribution to Part I, analyzes the Olympic Games' promotion of peace by examining the relationship between the IOC and the United Nations (UN). As Burke points out, Olympic internationalism stresses its apolitical nature, yet it is steeped in political history. Burke examines how the IOC and UN moved from indifference to hostility to cooperation in the 1990s. The shared animosity began to shift in the 1980s as both the IOC and the UN confronted "moral marginality and monetary distress."⁷ In the 1990s, the IOC was beset by corruption scandals and rising costs, while the UN was condemned for withdrawing forces from Rwanda. Self-interest and a desire to improve their respective sullied reputations, Burke argues, prompted the shift toward cooperation, and culminated in the 1993 reintroduction of the Olympic Truce, in which countries at war call a truce during the Games.

While Part I studies ideals of sport and focuses on the Olympic Charter, Part II, "The Rise of Human Rights," considers how calls for human rights have become associated with the Olympics and the men's World Cup. Part II also considers how various groups have advocated for human rights and used the concept for...