ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ‘refugee crisis’, which denotes the central phenomenon of this book. Its heated political and media discussion—particularly between 2015 and 2016—acknowledges it as being widely influential under economical, political, and social aspects. However, the opinion of many activists and sociologists is that the phenomenon has been widely constructed as a crisis and that it has been instrumentalised as such. Explaining its impact on society and in particular on the sport system requires a description of the ‘crisis’ as a social context, as a process and in its relation with sport. This chapter thereby aims to furnish a sufficient contextual backdrop for the reader to better understand the ensuing arguments of this book and to understand the reasons beyond its polarised discussion.
