Changing the world through sport and play: A post-colonial analysis of Canadian volunteers within the 'Sport for Development and Peace' movement

This research focused on the experiences of Canadian volunteers within the 'Sport for Development and Peace' (SDP) movement. In this movement, sport is formally recognized, by organizations including the United Nations, to hold a utility in advancing social development, particularly in Low and Middle Income Countries. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 former interns from the International Development through Sport program organized and operated by Commonwealth Games Canada (CGC). CGC's program places qualified candidates with a sport and/or health partner organization in a Commonwealth nation in Africa or the Caribbean for a minimum of 8 months to facilitate the use of sport and play to meet development goals. A theoretical framework informed by sport sociology, post-colonial theory and international development studies was employed to investigate how and why sport is used in development, the socio-political consequences of SDP and the implications of sending young Canadians to serve as sport development facilitators and leaders. Framed within neo-Gramscian politics, the methodology centred on the Foucauldian subject as both the participant subject imagined within the SDP movement, and the subject position of the SDP volunteer.;The results offer evidence with which to argue that despite popular rhetoric regarding the political transcendence of sport in relation to its utility in development, the use of sport as a development tool is susceptible to the logic of contemporary neoliberalism whereby underprivileged people are primarily understood to lack the means to participate effectively in market capitalism. As such, SDP is beholden to the same political challenges that face international development as a whole. With respect to the subject position of the intern, internships such as those organized by the CGC program, may position young Canadians in a way that secures their transnational innocence and disavows relations of dominance, both historical and contemporary, the ethics of which require careful consideration. Finally, interns' perspectives suggest that the bio-politics of SDP mean that the complexities of social change within the movement often come to rest on the socially constructed and increasingly regulated physically active body, which encourage healthy bodies and deem them fit to succeed.