Recent years have seen the UN work using sport as a tool to empower refugees across the globe. A student here at the University of Edinburgh, Alice Calder, has been part of a programme working with the UN carrying out research on how sport can be used in a positive way in these areas, and The Student spoke to her about this work.
Specifically, her role entailed her being “part of the regional Academy of the United Nations, which is an international organisation that gets MA and PhD students all around the world to come together, to work with different UN bodies, to create change through youth knowledge.”
“I was specifically placed in a team of four with the UNHCR Sports Diplomacy Body, and my role, as a researcher, was essentially to conglomerate research in order to back certain aims they wanted to achieve. So if they wanted to look into a certain area, often they rely on publications,”
This was a multifaceted task, looking principally at refugee involvement in sport, giving Alice the scope to “interview international bodies, international institutions, athletes themselves, in order to collect an overview of something.” This would largely focus on an understanding of the existing barriers to refugee participation. These findings could then be implemented by the relevant UN bodies in order to tailor their programmes more effectively.
Much of the work was curtailed by several factors: firstly, the eurocentrism of much of the existing research meant Alice and her team were forced to “branch out.” While countries like Canada and Mexico are fruitful sources, other nations are less forthcoming. “The US, unfortunately, has redacted a lot of its funding,” and while there is a real desire to expand the research and the programmes, many nations are “not able to access the refugee citizen or refugee recognition and, as a result of that, they can’t access any of the refugee funding for sports.”
Asia, for instance, represents “a real pocket for research, but it’s very hard to engage with athletes to speak up about that.”
Another challenge was promoting sport for certain groups, for example women. Again, much of the existing research was limited, so Alice’s project was ambitious in the extent to which it focused on women and minorities in sport. “It’s normally centred around football and refugee participation; minority participation, especially within the women’s category, within football is very limited.”
Given the current instability and conflict in the world, at first glance sport seems a strange thing to be a concern for the UN. Alice was, however, very positive about its potential:
“I would reframe concern as opportunity. Number one, it has a huge international platform. It reaches a wide, wide audience, whereby we can even watch it on the go nowadays. And it’s got a real community vibe around it.” She added: “It’s a platform through which people who maybe wouldn’t be exposed to certain opportunities can see these opportunities in action.”
The presence of a refugee team at the last three Olympic Games has demonstrated that visibility is a key part of the programme, an encouragement to refugees everywhere that sport is open to them and holds huge opportunity. Cameroonian boxer Cindy Ngamba’s bronze medal in boxing last year in Paris is a prime example of this.
Alice’s work focuses primarily on refugee policy, but rests within the broader frame of sports diplomacy. The idea of ‘sports diplomacy’ is not a new one – the US table tennis team’s visit to China in the 1970s is credited, correctly or otherwise, with America’s opening up to Mao – and Alice sees great potential in its usage.
“It’s quite a useful mechanism for diplomacy itself, because it’s getting athletes involved so they can bypass systems and norms.” Much like other aspects of Alice’s work, sports diplomacy functions on multiple levels: “Sometimes things are nation-led, sometimes things are region-led, sometimes things are privately led. It means that the UN has quite a lot of leeway to be able to leverage certain parts for diplomatic efforts.”
Finally, we discussed how the programme—and the UN’s involvement in sport more generally—could move forward, and the unfortunate gap between Alice’s own hopes and the financial realities: “Funding is being taken away from certain smaller departments. You see UNICEF and certain humanitarian crises, of course, funding will primarily go to that.”
Furthermore, “the UN sports diplomacy department’s relations with public bodies are very fragile as they are voluntary. This meant we had to reach out independently to gather the broad spectrum and grounded data necessary for our research.”
“I hope that in the future, certain bodies become more open to communication and change, because it’s an amazing mechanism through which you can deploy change, and deploy it on the global scale, and on the diplomatic scale, and on the international scale, and also on the grassroots scale.”
With so much good work already underway, it would be a shame to see progress squandered, but Alice’s work, and the enthusiasm with which she advocates for it, is a sign of real positivity and potential in using sport for good.
Image credits: “United Nations” by *Muhammad* is licensed under CC BY 2.0.