This book offers research findings of the different types of human rights issues that concern athletes and sports programs and the issue of how organizations are addressing safety and human rights issues. The study of sports has not typically been considered as a human rights field. In recent years it is clear that athletes have experienced a variety of human rights violations. As a result, many sports programs have been confronted with criminal violations of abuse and maltreatment. Some sports organizations are developing athlete bills of rights in response. The book provides readers with an overview of the importance of human rights policies and practices in sports, and a synthesis of where the field of sport human rights could be developed. The chapters explores human rights in sports from both organizational and interpersonal approaches. There are both organizational and individual factors associated with human rights. There can be rights violations by coaches, trainers, doctors, or even other athletes. Violations can be physical, sexual, emotional, social, or financial. Organizational policies vary from being very equitable and rights-respecting to those that put athletes at risk or discriminate against them. This book is the first of its kind that links together sports and human rights in a systematic way.

This book explores the interrelationships between nations, regions and states in the landscape of contemporary international sport, focusing on identity. Using case studies, the book explores themes such as the geopolitics of sports events, contested identities, and ownership of sport.

These essays include theoretical analyses by Richard Falk, Jack Donnelly and James Rosenau. Chapters on sex tourism, international markets and communications technology bring fresh perspectives to emerging issues. The authors investigate places such as the Dominican Republic, Nigeria and the Philippines.

The globalizing influence of professional sports Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global—and globalizing—sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

This book discusses major discourses of performing sports within human rights. Research findings data demonstrate that sports is an inequitable field today that has the potential to be a social change agent. There is more discussion about rights violations and what the fields of sports can do to be more rights-respecting, but the discussions are at a surface, rather than analytic level for most sports organizations. In sports, culture and human rights, as an emerging field, it is important to develop well crafter theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical body of knowledge. There is an academic discipline of sport that showcases its interdisciplinary nature. Linking sport to the field of human rights will require theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical evolution in this new discipline. There are both organizational, environmental and individual factors associated within the nexus of sports, athletes and human rights. This book links together sports and human rights in a systematic and analytical way. It contains chapters that discuss human rights policies in performing sports, from both organizational and interpersonal perspectives. The book focuses on the benefits of sports and the human rights and safety challenges within the operations of sports organizations and their impact on individual players.

"Lifts the analysis out of the nuts and bolts of sports policy and into some really thought-provoking areas which will equip the policy maker for the challenges of the 21st century" - Dominic Malcolm, Loughborough University "This is an excellent analysis of the significance of globalisation for national sport policy and especially of the impact of global processes at the local socio-cultural level" - Barrie Houlihan, Loughborough University Drawing upon a range of empirical case studies, Catherine Palmer situates sports policy within a broader consideration of global processes, practices and consequences, exploring the relationship between: the local and the global globalization and governance new technologies human rights the environment corporate responsibility. In doing so she sets out the ground for an understanding of policy making in sport and how this affects society. Covering both theory and practice, it is a detailed and thought provoking resource for students of sports policy, sports development, sports management and sports studies.