ABSTRACT
Sport no longer exists in the margins of international relations. A residual intellectual snobbishness still leads some to assume either that sport is a mindless activity or that it poses no interesting questions for the student of society and politics, but this is fast disappearing as the realization dawns of the important part that sport plays in the lives of untold millions across the globe, rich and poor alike. The academic subject of international relations (IR), however, has lagged behind sociologists and historians in giving serious attention to sport, and this book aims to ignite its interest by indicating the many points of interconnection. The neglect may have been initially caused by the subject’s obsession with the high politics of inter-state relations, but trans-national relations have been a main focus now for over 30 years, and the assaults on realism have been so common over the same period as to become banal. A more convincing explanation lies in the sheer range of subjects which IR has to cover, from world health to biological weapons, from gender to geopolitics. It is difficult, given the continued minority status of IR specialists in political science departments, to do justice to all the issues generated in world politics. All of us have to be generalists to a greater or lesser degree.
