Max Stephenson

Theorizing the role of sport for development and peacebuilding

This article reviews the recent literature concerning the roles of sport in development and peacebuilding, and proposes three related propositions concerning that work. First, we contend this emerging field has been under-theorized to date. Second, we argue that meso-level theories, chiefly public sphere, field and network theory may prove especially auspicious starting places for theory building for this complex area of inquiry. Finally, we caution that efforts to develop a more robust theorization of the roles of sport in development and peacebuilding must be thoroughly contextualized if they are to prove meaningful for researchers and practitioners alike. Overall, this analysis suggests sport can indeed serve useful roles in development and peacebuilding, but that it does not constitute a substitute for developing social norms and values that conduce to mutual tolerance and shared commitment to non-violent conflict management. These, finally, underpin any success sport may enjoy as an instrument of development or peace.

Exploring the Challenges and Prospects for Polycentricity in International Humanitarian Relief

The coordination of relief in international humanitarian crises has long been viewed as fraught with problems of inadequate oversight and coordination. Contrary to this claim, this article argues that the international relief system, viewed as interdependent actors, is better understood on the basis of the principle of polycentricity. The authors sketch the conditions necessary to secure a polycentric social order and compare these to the international humanitarian relief framework. They argue that polycentricity may be a more apt aspiration for participants in the international relief system than are calls for new and more stringent forms of monocentric coordination, but its conditions too may be difficult for the relevant participants to realize. The authors explore the tensions and possibilities implicit in this reframing at both the strategic and operating scales.

Planning, Development, and Media A Case Study of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge

Given the importance of the media in 21st-century western liberal democracies, planning actors that seek media attention may do so for multiple ends, such as to dampen controversy and increase their status as “stars” in their professions through media branding. We develop a case study of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge project, along with expert interviews with public relations specialists, journalists, editors, producers, and scientists. We find that development professionals, including scientists, adopted mediatized behaviors, such as filming themselves, while working so that audiences might witness experts’ actions and successes. The stories and ideas that reached broad audiences concerned experts’ stories rather than those of a broad array of stakeholders.

Unforeseen and Unaccounted: the European Union, the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, peacebuilding, and accountability

This article examines the case of the Community Foundation for Northern Irelands (CFNI) experience as a primary recipient of peacebuilding aid from the European Union (EU) under the Special EU Programmes Body Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (SEUPB-EUSSPPR). The case serves as a lens into the tensions that such efforts create for community-based organizations as they seek both to honor their funders accountability claims and their own needs to ensure legitimacy and efficacy with those with whom they interact so as to secure space and discretion to seek to catalyze social experimentation and learning. This paper argues the Foundations experience and frustrations with EU accountability claims point up a difficulty with the SEUPBs comprehensive conceptualization of peacebuilding: It tends in practice to favor Union-prescribed aims and objectives over those its ‘partners’ derive from their daily efforts.

Exploring the Intersection of Theory and Practice of Arts for Peacebuilding

A rising number of public and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) leaders are employing the arts in efforts aimed at encouraging social change. Meanwhile, scholars have offered a number of theories concerning the character of political agency and its exercise, and contended that effective use of the arts may result in individual and group epistemic change. Far fewer analysts, however, have married such theorisations of aesthetics with empirical investigations of how professionals actually use the arts to promote such shifts. This article addresses this concern by studying the strategies adopted by two international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs), American Voices and Bond Street Theatre, that have worked to encourage peace through music and theatre-making in light of changing conceptions of agency and the power of aesthetics to stimulate its exercise. We outline the approaches these NGOs adopt to do so and the mechanisms by which their leaders believe their work catalyses changes in values at the individual and community levels. We argue that understanding these dynamics more thoroughly and in light of conceptions of agency and aesthetics leads to a stronger theorisation of whether and how arts-based peacebuilding efforts can lead to sustainable community cultural change.

Biopolitical and Disciplinary Peacebuilding: Sport, Reforming Bodies and Rebuilding Societies

The peacebuilding political rationality established in the first years of the current century broadened the target of such efforts from state institutions to populations and adopted an array of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques aimed at changing individuals and the ways they live together. This article explores international organization discourses on sport and peacebuilding and argues that the broad consensus on sport as a peacebuilding strategy is most fruitfully explored in light of the intensification of the biopolitical and disciplinary trajectories of the liberal peace.

Program Development Issues in Nonprofit and Civil Society Studies: Learning from One University’s Experience

Abstract This article examines one university’s efforts to institutionalize a graduate nonprofit curriculum. It does so through the lens of situational analysis and with an eye to five key challenges that have dogged the effort—operating in an inauspicious organizational environment, creating an interdisciplinary program in a discipline-rich context, securing a praxis analytical focus and shared pedagogical stance, ensuring a comparative analytical focus, and developing a sustainable balance between student needs and expert claims. These concerns are examined for what might be learned from each that may hold broader significance for nonprofit curriculum design, program development, and implementation. While some of these conditions are unique, what they suggest about the challenges for those seeking institutionalization of nonprofit curricula are not. The essay seeks to suggest how and why that might be so. The paper argues that, regardless of the case-specific factors at play in the present analysis, would-be nonprofit program builders would be wise to be attentive to their operating context, to the nature of existing program curricula and organizational cultures, and to the clear specification of their own curricular aims.