Introduction

In this article, I advocate for the relevance and utility of ancient materials and sources in theorizing and implementing contemporary peacebuilding methods. In particular, I focus on the enduring use of sports and athletics as tools for transitioning combatants from wartime to peacetime, for mitigating the negative social consequences of warfare, and for developing a resilient, interconnected transnational community. I draw examples from well-documented source materials of ancient Greek athletics in order to make connections between ancient and modern practice and to draw useful lessons for today’s practitioners. By offering transcultural comparisons of approaches to conflict resolution through athletic competition, this article contributes also to debates about the ethics of using sport as an interventionist tool in post-conflict societies and demonstrates the benefits of taking a long historical view of global issues.

The ancient Hellenes were certainly not unique in the history of world civilizations either in being more or less constantly at war with one another, or in developing coping mechanisms and strategies through athletics for addressing combat trauma, survivor’s guilt, and the myriad pathologies brought on by conflict and the lived experiences of war. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that Greek athletic culture has enjoyed a special status in modern philosophies of both sport and peace. This status is due partly to the privileged place of “Grecoroman” antiquity in traditional hierarchies of world cultural histories. It is due in greater degree, however relatedly, to the influence of the philosophy of “Olympism”, which since its origins in the nineteenth century has invoked the ancient Olympic festival as a powerful, if idealized, example of how sport should promote peaceful social relations. Classical scholars have illuminated how the mythology of an ancient “Olympic truce” (ekecheiria) re-emerged in the twentieth century as a powerful rhetorical and ideological tool for promoting peace through sport (Bromberg, 2020). This mythology is enshrined especially in the influential accounts of the games’ origins written in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Rooted in the bloody soil of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE)– a generation-long conflict of particular brutality among the major powers of the Greek-speaking world–the stories about the ancient origins of the Olympic festival by Gorgias, Lysias, and Isocrates all emphasize the festival’s legendary foundations and its ability to bring together former rivals in peace and unanimity. In Lysias’ mythologizing account, Herakles founded the Olympic festival believing that “the meeting here would be the beginning of mutual friendship among the Greeks” (ἡγήσατο γὰρ τὸν ἐνθάδε σύλλογον ἀρχὴν γενήσεσθαι τοῖς Ἕλλησι τῆς πρὸς ἀλλήλους φιλίας, Lys. 33.2) (Volonaki, 2011). The most famous articulation of this sentiment appears in Isocrates’ Panegyricus, which claims that:

having made treaties with one another and resolved our pending hostilities, we come together in the same place, where, as we make our prayers and sacrifices in common, we are reminded of the kinship which exists among us and are made to feel kinder towards each other for the future, reviving our old friendships and establishing new ties. (Isoc. Paneg. 43).

Contemporary texts echo this sentiment that the Olympic athletic festival, and especially the Olympic truce (ekecheiria) fostered peacebuilding and conflict resolution among warring Greek cities. The same narrative is preserved centuries later in the work of Phlegon of Tralles, a freedman of Hadrian who wrote a history of the Games through the 229th Olympiad (140 CE). Phlegon characterizes the impulse to revive the games in antiquity as a wish “to restore unanimity (ὁμόνοιαν) and peace (εἰρήνην) among the people again” (Phlegon of Tralles, fr. 1.2-4) (Raubitschek, 1988, p. 35-6).¹

These texts have exerted a wide and profound influence since antiquity, on historians and philosophers of sport, athletes, coaches, patrons, and fans, as well as on policymakers, non-government agents, and practitioners. Pierre de Coubertin, one of the founding figures of the modern Olympics believed that international sport and competition were among the most effective means of overcoming misunderstandings between nations and, consequently, of preventing future wars (Bromberg, 2021b). Their impression of the Olympic truce is enshrined both in the charter of the International Olympic Committee (henceforth, “IOC”) and in the United Nations’ resolution 48/11 (October 25, 1993), which recognized the IOC’s efforts “to restore the ancient Greek tradition of the ekecheiria, or ‘Olympic Truce’, in the interest of contributing to international understanding and the maintenance of peace.” But even beyond Olympism and international Olympic rhetoric, where the discourse of peace-making and conflict resolution continues to play a significant role, the pursuit of peace is perhaps the most widespread and enduring value in today’s global sporting culture.

The endurance and popularity of this ideal is particularly visible in the rapid adoption over the past thirty years of sport as an interventionist tool in post-conflict settings across the Global North and South. Already a decade ago, the Sport for Development and Peace (henceforth, “SDP”) sector had experienced enormous growth, with the numbers of global SDP projects estimated to number in the thousands.³ Alongside innumerable organizations and programs that now exist around the world, a commensurate number of academic studies have been undertaken and published across disciplines, especially in sociology, anthropology, and political science. Since 2013, the Journal of Sport for Development has published case studies, advancing knowledge and disseminating best practices for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in the SDP sector. In the same year, a UN General Assembly resolution (67/296, 23 August 2013,) established April 6 as the “International Day of Sport for Development and Peace” (“IDSDP”).⁴ The date was chosen for its historical link to the opening day of the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens. With over 180 participating nations since 2014, the April 6 campaign reflects the global support network for SDP programs, which includes not only national and international sporting organizations, schools and universities, governments, supra-national governmental organizations (like the United Nations) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).⁵

For at least as long, however, ancient historians have pointed out that even a millennium of Olympic truces in antiquity appears to have done very little to curb interstate warfare, and moreover that athletic culture (including athletic festival culture) was tightly intertwined with military culture throughout the history of the ancient games. For every historian who characterizes the truce as a “cessation of hostilities all around Greece while the festival was convened,” another has observed that “warfare would scarcely have been possible,” if hostilities around Greece actually ceased every time one of the ancient athletic contests invoked a “sacred truce” (Spivey, 2004, p. 189-90; Harris, 1964, p. 156).⁶ In the history of twentieth-century warfare, which has shown no sign of abating in the twenty-first century, the development of Olympism sits uneasily alongside some of history’s bloodiest conflicts, and the Games themselves have been cancelled by war (1916, 1940, 1944) or become the sites of terrorism (1972, 1996). At the same time, it has long observed that tension between the IOC (which emphasizes peace, understanding, and solidarity) and the individual National Olympic Committees (“NOC”, which privilege national interests) leaves international sport vulnerable to crisis. “The national interests in international sport are hardly defined in terms of the common good,” wrote Kalevi Heinilä in a paper from the peak of the Cold War: “Instead they are framed in terms of victory and success” (Heinilä, 1985, p. 242). Building from a pilot study of these competing value orientations, Heinilä predicted that the growth in popularity and visibility of international athletic competition would drive more nations to mobilize and expend their available resources to achieve victory and success. This feature of international sport calls into question the popular and long-held, idealized view that global sporting events like the Olympics “unite the world”.⁷

Taking these considerations into account, it would be easy to conclude that, so far, the IOC’s vision for international peace through sport has been a failure. But this conclusion is, as I will argue, unjust, and not only because of the instances when the IOC has used the Games to promote social well-being.⁸ This pessimistic view of international sport lays heavy emphasis on nations as the chief agents in peacebuilding, and from this perspective, only a lasting peace between nations would be a satisfying and successful outcome. Now, to be fair to exponents of this view, Coubertin–who remains in many ways an influential thinker among Olympic philosophers and who lived through the painful early decades of European nationalism–helped to establish this agenda, arguing for the peacemaking potential of sport in explicitly nationalistic terms:

Should the [revived Olympic Games] prosper – as, I am persuaded, all civilized nations aiding, that it will – it may be a potent, if indirect, factor in securing universal peace. Wars break out because nations misunderstand each other. We shall not have peace until the prejudices that now separate the different races are outlived. To attain this end, what better means is there than to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility? (Coubertin, 2000, p. 360, with emphasis added)⁹

Coubertin’s conflation of nations and races aside, his vision for peace through sport is laid out in the characteristically nineteenth-century (and twentieth-century) terms of armed conflict between sovereign nations. And his view reflects the suppositions of reductionist, “realist” schools of international relations: that nations (sovereign states) are the primary agents in world events, and that nations are unitary agents, speaking with a single voice and acting in response to a single, unified set of national interests (Waltz, 1979, ch. 2). Such a view has ancient roots, especially in Thucydides’ influential state-centric history of the Peloponnesian War, and perhaps as a result, criticisms of the ancient Olympic truce (ekecheiria) by ancient historians and philosophers of ancient sport reveal a state-centric approach. Their arguments privilege the city-state (polis) as the sole point of reference in ancient Greek cultural politics, and the only significant actor in questions of war and peace. On account of this emphasis on the polis, however, little attention has been given to the ways that athletics may have functioned on scales other than that of the polis as means of peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

Putting aside the need for “peace” to mean “peace between nation-states” and embracing instead a multi-scalar, translational view of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, allows us to grasp these important functions, and to reframe debates about the peacemaking potential of global sport. This paper explores this contrasting view that many impactful and lasting peacebuilding and post-conflict outcomes occur on scales other than the inter-national. Decentering the nation (or the ancient polis) in the discussion of conflict resolution can therefore be seen as part of the larger project of reorienting cultural and political histories from the bottom-up.¹⁰ In the context of sport, that means de-emphasizing the top-down role of the IOC, NOCs, mega-sporting events (like the Olympics and the World Cup), and world-level athletes in shaping the global culture, and focusing attention instead on local actors and grassroots projects, led by community organizers in response to specific needs and histories. Their impacts are possible to recognize, study, and share due in large part to the social media toolkit of SDP practitioners, which highlights and emphasizes the efforts of individuals in local communities, and the publication since 2013 of JSD. Since its inception, the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace (“IDSDP”) has promoted itself by identifying elements of sport that contribute to peacebuilding processes: it transcends cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries; it encourages teamwork, fairness, discipline, and respect for others; it controls or redirects violent tendencies; and it is cost-effective and flexible:

Sport can help to create and forge human interactions and improve relations between conflicting parties. Therefore, sport and peacebuilding together imply the core value of developing quality of relationships and strengthening people’s capacity to manage conflict and social issues in non-violent ways. (Peace and Sport [brochure], 2021)¹¹

The IDSDP offers participants social media tools to promote its “White Card Campaign”, with suggested Tweets aimed at different audiences, the general public, athletes, politicians, etc. The 2019 edition of the IDSDP featured nearly 800 projects in over 180 countries, through events organized locally and registered globally. This organizational model supports the view that the promise of peace through sport is most possible at scales other than the international, in the many evolving contexts for sport and athletics within and beyond nations. It also demonstrates the complex interplay of global and local (sometimes described as “glocalization”) that is one of the essential dynamics of globalization. These intra-national and trans-national functions of sport, in contrast to the inter-national, are the subjects of this paper.¹² My thesis is that hyper-local, community programs reflect the peacebuilding aims, methods, and outcomes of ancient athletic culture, and that a comparative examination of ancient and modern practices in conflict-resolution through sport will be mutually illuminating.

The IDSDP’s language about peacebuilding (quoted above) alludes to the broad understanding of “peace” that has emerged in response to the work of Johan Galtung, one of the founders of the field of peace studies. Galtung introduced the distinction between “negative peace” (the absence of “personal” and “direct” violence) and “positive peace” (the absence of “structural” and “indirect” violence), in order to contrast the effects of war with those of poverty, discrimination, social injustice, and economic or political inequalities: “Direct violence is usually measured in number of deaths,” he reasoned, “One could approach structural violence in the same way, looking at e.g. the number of avoidable deaths that occur because medical and sanitary resources are concentrated in the upper classes” (Galtung & Höivik, 1971, p. 73).¹³ Galtung defined “positive peace” as an ideal state (approached, but never fully achieved) that includes but transcends “negative peace”, in which the direct violence of war and indirect, structural inequalities have been removed (Jeong, 2000, p. 24-25; Cortright, 2008, p. 7; Wilson, 2014, p. 25). From this perspective, peacemaking is a long-term process that, in addition to establishing lasting “negative peace”, attempts to prevent the recurrence of violence by addressing root causes and effects of conflict through reconciliation, institution building, and political as well as economic transformation.

In addressing post-conflict societies, Galtung identified three postwar stages, which he called the “three Rs” (resolution, reconciliation, and reconstruction), noting that “if you do only one of these three without the other two you will not even get that one” (Galtung, 1998, p. 8). The third of these (“reconstruction”) contained four further objectives in peace-building: rehabilitation, which refers to the healing of post-combat trauma trough psycho-social support project; rebuilding, which corresponds to the recreation of necessary pre-conflict infrastructure, networks, and institutions; restructuration, which refers to the alteration or abandonment of pre-conflict structures, especially those determined to undermine the search for positive peace, and the substitution in their place of new social structures and entities that will contribute to peacebuilding; and reculturation, which denotes the transformation of a culture of violence into a culture of non-violence. Within this framework, sport offers a unique set of physical, social, and structural initiatives that can be put to the use of in post-conflict scenarios. These four objectives of post-conflict reconstruction form the organizational framework for the remainder of this essay.

Rehabilitation/reintegration

The rehabilitation of the social fabric in a post-conflict society requires community members, and especially former combatants, to become empowered and immersed in pursuing “a generative forging of new life out of the ruins of the old” (Pugh, 1998, p. 2; cf. Jeong, 2000, p. 133). Michael Pugh offers the following useful definition:

a process of social, political and economic adjustment to, and underpinning of, conditions of relative peace in which the participants, especially those who have been disempowered and immiserated by violence, can begin to prioritise future goals beyond immediate survival. (Pugh, 2000, p. 2).

He stresses furthermore that survivors of conflict must not only be invested in these processes, and in fact should be permitted and encouraged to take up active roles in achieving them. The SDP case-study through which I would like to examine these processes, involves the experience of former child soldiers after the civil war in Sierre Leone (1991-2002). It has been estimated that over 6,000 children went through the processes of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (“DDR”) in Sierra Leone, of which as many as 80% were between the ages of seven and 14.¹⁴

The case study published by Christopher Dyck in 2011, draws on data collected between May and September 2005 in two DDR camps. Thirteen interviews were conducted with former child and youth combatants participating in the DDR program, as well as with adult camp administrators and caretakers. The rehabilitation/reintegration needs of former child combatants are especially severe:

After conflict ends, child combatants suffer from particularly acute forms of structural violence, including psychosocial stress, which is often described in terms of depression, violent behavior, disturbing memories of violence, anxiety and fear. Youth combatants must detach psychologically and socially from their former armed group and military identity (Dyck, 2011, p. 399).

Dyck’s interviews revealed four immediate benefits of sport in the DDR camps. First and foremost, study revealed a gradual reduction in the level of direct violence among male youths. Second, the interactions on the football pitch between DDR youth and local teams fostered a sense of community.

The ex-combatants feared being stigmatized (or worse) by the community, especially those who had committed acts of direct violence against their families or communities, and the communities themselves viewed the DDR youth with suspicion and fear. One camp administrator characterizes the atmosphere of mistrust as volatile:

People in the community called the boys ‘rebels’. That would make them [the ex-combatants] go very wild. The youth didn’t like that because they had disarmed and explained that they wanted to be normal citizens again. This hurt them a lot and made them turn very violent against the community (Dyck, 2011, p. 405, citing a personal interview conducted in Bo, 23 June 2005).

Sport programs created opportunities for DDR youth to interact with their neighbors, while mitigating the negative public image of the DDR camps and their inhabitants. As Dyck explains, “Football games became the framework for re-establishing relations with these communities, which had the effect of helping all parties to come to terms with ex-combatants in the post-war period” (Dyck, 2011, p. 402). Third, these football games established social networks that promoted other development efforts. The study’s author cites the experience of two girls, also ex-combatants, who described the role of sport programs in promoting friendships, especially for those without family or community supports. According to one of the girls:

Without sports, we would have been keeping to ourselves. As we played, we came to know one another. Without sports, I would only think about what I am going to do. But sports brought us together so that we would interact with one another, so I thought of us as a team or group. (Dyck, 2011, p. 406, citing a personal interview conducted in Bo, 6 July 2005)

Building on these new friendships and networks, camp administrators attempted to link sports programs with vocational training and other projects. An administrator from the Freetown DDR camp, for instance, cited an example of two youths who had played football in the same team, and received vocational training. After the camp ended, one returned to his home in Freetown, trained as a carpenter, and the other returned to the northern town of Kabala, trained in construction. When the carpenter was later hired to build a house in Freetown, he called his friend from Kabala to exchange their skills (Dyck, 2011, p. 407, citing a personal interview conducted in Freetown, 16 June 2005). Finally (fourth), sport distracted youths from the stress and trauma of their experience. “Football helped me to stop thinking of other things from my past,” explained one male ex-combatant, adding, “Whenever I am on the pitch I will be fully concentrating on the game.” Another, female ex-combatant shared a similar sentiment and reflected on how, “When we play volleyball, we are together with all our friends. We create fun and we laugh. So this made me forget about my past” (Dyck, 2011, p. 407-8, citing personal interviews conducted in Bo on (respectively) 14 and 6 July 2005).

Dyck’s case study illustrates the high impact and value of local interventions and programs in rehabilitating and reintegrating ex-combatants, while simultaneously serving the needs of a post-conflict community. Studies of post-combat trauma and rehabilitation in ancient Athens, where citizenship was closely intertwined with military service, have emphasized the role of community theater in offering ex-combatants forms of “catharsis” or “cultural therapy” (Shay, 1994, 1995, 2002; Meineck, 2012).¹⁵ Scholars have long observed that the plots of tragic dramas describe the effects of combat trauma with chilling realism and familiarity. The influential studies by Jonathan Shay of combat trauma, survivor’s guilt, and the trials of post-conflict reintegration in the Iliad and Odyssey demonstrate how ancient and modern experiences of war can be mutually illuminating; while theater directors, such as Peter Meineck and Brian Doerries, have used the ancient scripts by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to design innovative programs by and for veterans and other survivors of conflict (Shay, 1994, 2002; Meineck, 2009; Doerries, 2015). In 1995, Shay also wrote a brief essay for the online journal Didaskalia, observing five “basic social and cognitive capacities required for democratic participation”, derived from his own clinical practice with Vietnam-era veterans (Shay, 1995):

• being able to show up at an appointed time and place, possibly in a crowd of strangers

• being able to experience words as trustworthy

• seeing the possibility of persuasion, negotiation, compromise, concession

• seeing the possibility of winning without killing, of losing without dying

• seeing the future as real and meaningful.

Shay’s essay emphasizes role of community in the process of healing from combat trauma, arguing that the Athenian theater served as a “primary means” of communalizing therapy. He argues that “the distinctive character of Athenian theater arose from the political need to purify, purge, and reclarify civic understanding to its returning soldiers, so they could again fulfill the roles of citizens of a democracy” (Shay, 1995, cf. Meineck, 2012, p. 10-1).

In responding to this argument elsewhere, I have suggested that athletic programs and facilities, especially the institution of the gymnasion/ palaestra, were also ideally suited to facilitate the rehabilitation and reintegration of veterans–even better suited, perhaps, than the theater (Bromberg, 2020, p. 290-1). Even in Athens, a city renowned (some might say, notorious) for its influential theater culture (see Plato, Laws 3. 701–2; Aristotle, Politics 3.1281b6–10), many months would go by before soldiers returning from a summer campaign could watch a tragedy. On the other hand, a veteran could run, throw, wrestle, or box on the very day that he returned, as Socrates does in the opening lines of Plato’s Charmides (153a-b):

Yesterday evening we returned from the army at Potidaea, and having been a good while away, I thought that I should like to go and look at my old haunts. And so, I went into the palaestra of Taureas, which is over against the temple of Basile, and there I found a number of persons, most of whom I knew, but not all. My visit was unexpected, and no sooner did they see me entering than they saluted me from afar on all sides, and Chaerephon, who always behaves like a madman, started up from among them and ran to me, seizing my hand and saying, “How did you escape from the battle, Socrates?”

The community of friends and strangers, whom Socrates encounters at Taureas’ palaestra, greets him warmly and welcome him back home, and the palaestra offers a context to kindle and rekindle friendships and to rejoin the Athenian community in a friendly and predictable setting.

Rebuilding

Socrates’ arrival and experience in Taureas’ palaestra reinforces the critical role of civic infrastructure in facilitating the reintegration of returning combat veterans. This brings me to Galtung’s second objective: rebuilding, and the importance of maintaining and restoring necessary pre-conflict infrastructure, networks, and institutions. Athletic facilities were an exceedingly common, almost defining feature of ancient Greek communities. The itinerant writer Pausanias lists a gymnasium among the buildings whose absence from the Phocian town of Panopeus leads him to question its status as a polis: “if one can call ‘polis’ those who lack a town-hall, a gymnasium, a theater, an agora, a fountain-house…” (εἴγε ὀνομάσαι τις πόλιν καὶ τούτους οἷς γε οὐκ ἀρχεῖα οὐ γυμνάσιόν ἐστιν, οὐ θέατρον οὐκ ἀγορὰν ἔχουσιν, οὐχ ὕδωρ κατερχόμενον ἐς κρήνην, Paus. 10.4.1). The derisive comment is not solely derisive, but also highlights the importance these facilities to the well-being (and no doubt, to the prestige) of a community, and the gymnasium is second only to the government office in his list of necessary institutions. As we explore the role of sport in post-conflict scenarios, we are in a position to appreciate the importance of these buildings and institutions as spaces where veterans and others can find distractions from their experiences and safely rejoin the community.

These essential functions are on display in SDP interventions that use local gyms as safe spaces for at-risk youth, as in the following case study from Guatemala. Beginning in 2012, the Hoodlinks program has focused developing Olympic values in Guatemala’s at-risk youth. Its stated purpose is, “[to] place education of Olympic values and sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” (Mandigo et al., 2018, p. 23). The program includes Boxing and Taekwondo in Zone 18 and Athletics, Badminton, Boxing, Judo, and Gymnastics in Zone 7. Combined, these two zones account for close to one third of all homicides in the capital (Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo. Informe de monitoreo de violencia y situación de derechos humanos de enero a Mayo 2014, cited 2015 Jun 17).¹⁶ The study lead by James Mandigo of Brock University in Ontario ran from August 2015 to March 2016, and involved a total of 116 athletes averaging 13 years old (80 males; 36 females) along with five coaches. Athletes were asked to complete questionnaires assessing their development of life skills and levels of aggression. The questionnaires were administered at the beginning of the study period in August and again at its end in March. Participants emphasized the importance of having safe places for youth to play, while others gratefully acknowledged the distraction from violence that the facilities offered:

My son did not have the opportunity to go to another place because the place we live at is dangerous, so he hadn’t been able to go. So now that we had the opportunity to come here [to the gym], my son is too excited. So he told me to come here and thanks God, here we are and I even do the [Boxing] practice with him… (Mandigo et al., 2018, p. 28)

Another parent acknowledged that the Hoodlinks gyms provided a valuable distraction from potentially dangerous activities:

When the Olympic Foundation hadn’t arrived yet, there were some people who came to try to convince young people to be gang members. But we thank God because when the Olympic Foundation started the project in here, all the young people joined and this place gets full. Little by little the situation has been more calmed. (Mandigo et al., 2018, p. 29)

While at first glance it may seem counter-productive to use combative sports (boxing, judo, taekwondo) to assist in the reduction of youth violence, previous research does support the use of such sports to facilitate life skills. In an essay from 2006, Whitney Wright provides an insightful glimpse into the culture of boxing and why it is such a positive sport for adolescents who are high risk and previous offenders of violent behaviors:

The environment inside the gym presents an alternative to their life outside. It is focused, supportive and respectful of space and others. When a young person enters the gym, he or she can embrace an engaging atmosphere and become a focused boxer. Gaining an athletic ethic through the groups helps the youth not only begin to form a positive self-identity that will help them live a fulfilling life, but it also encourages a practice of self-preservation. (Wright, 2006, p. 150)

Again, the physical environment and “engaging atmosphere” of the gymnasium space is the key to its success. Boxing in particular has a prominent history in sport for peace theories, going back to Coubertin, who appreciated the paradoxical nature of sport (“[athletics] can be used to strengthen peace or to prepare for war”) and firmly believed in the peace-building potential of boxing (Coubertin, 2000, p. 322; Bromberg, 2020, p. 288-96). In several of his writings, he the alludes to English schoolmasters calling boxing gloves “keepers of the peace”, and in one letter he even claims that “a boy’s education is not complete without some contact with ‘combat sports’” (Coubertin, 2000, p. 136-7;¹⁷ 177).¹⁸

Restructuration

Given the aim of eschewing structural forms of violence in achieving “positive” peace, developing social infrastructure that eradicates the root causes of violence is just as important as developing or rebuilding physical spaces for community building and reintegration. This objective of “restructuration” is third in Galtung’s list. It describes the modification or abandonment of pre-conflict structures (seen as catalysts of both direct/ physical and indirect/structural forms of violence) in favor of new social norms and institutions that will facilitate long-term, positive peacebuilding. Galtung signals a need for social and economic justice and mobility:

When violence breaks out there are usually two structural causes: too much dominance, politically as oppression and/ or economically as exploitation; or too much distance, between classes or other groups, including countries. Combine the two and we get the phenomenon known as (social) exclusion or marginalization. In extreme cases we get what can be called atomie, a pathological society of egocentric, cost-benefit oriented individuals, and little or no social tissue left. (Galtung, 1998, p. 58)¹⁹

Because of the long time-scales involved (Galtung stresses that progress in restructuration is measured over decades), the effects of SDP interventions on economic inequality, racism and other forms of discrimination, and other social justice issues are difficult to measure. At the same time, scholars have observed and critiqued how the “neoliberal tenor” of the SDP movement, which builds upon the structures of transnational corporate capitalism, in fact intensifies inequalities and stands in tension with social justice goals (Hayhurst & Szto, 2016, p. 524-5, with bibliography). The growing influence of corporate capital in the SDP world calls into question whether privatized social justice campaigns can truly address structural inequalities. Lyndsay Hayhurst’s and Courtney Szto’s study of Nike’s N7 campaign for Indigenous Health suggests that they cannot: “privatized social justice benefits from a self-sustaining system than ensures there will always be inequality that needs to be addresses through consumption and other privatized means” (Hayhurst & Szto, 2016, p. 538). At the same time, some have observed the obstacles, dangers, and limitations facing international athletes who attempt to intervene in matters of social justice and equity. Many of those who use their athletic successes to advance progressive, especially antiracist programs: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Muhammad Ali, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and most recently, Colin Kaepernick are examples of superstar athletes whose activism negatively impacted their careers (Kaufman and Wolf, 2010, p. 156). Nevertheless, others have expressed confidence in top-down interventions by international athletes and mega-sporting events, which disseminate humanitarian messages and promote social justice by representing “cultural media through which their followers can more vividly imagine the community of humankind” (Giulianotti, 2005, p. 216; Pelak, 2005).

The relationship between ancient Greek athletics and social class structures remains the subject of active debate (Pleket, 1974, 1976; Young, 1984, p. 107-76; Pritchard, 2003; Kyle, 2007, p. 205-16; Golden, 2008, esp. p. 32-34; Christesen, 2014; Fisher, 2018). Beginning with Pleket’s sociological studies (1974, 1976) of ancient sport, scholars have struggled to understand whether members of poor, non-noble families participated in athletics, and what role sport might have played (if any) in facilitating upward social and economic mobility. A famous passage from Isocrates’ speech On the Team of Horses frankly acknowledges the tension between competitive athletes from different social and economic classes. Alcibiades’ son claims that his father “looked down on gymnastic contests, since he knew that some of the athletes were of low birth, from small towns, and barely educated” (γυμνικοὺς ἀγῶνας ὑπερεῖδεν, εἰδὼς ἐνίους τῶν ἀθλητῶν καὶ κακῶς γεγονότας καὶ μικρὰς πόλεις οἰκοῦντας καὶ ταπεινῶς πεπαιδευμένους, 33). Plekett claimed that the word “some” (ἐνίους) in this passage revealed that most athletes in the early fourth century belonged to the wealthier classes (Pleket, 1976, p. 73).²⁰ When discussing the means by which oligarchs centralized political control, Aristotle comments how, “[the rich] legislate in the same manner in regards to possessing weapons and participating in athletics (γυμνάζεσθαι)… there is no fine for the poor (τοῖς ἀπόροις) if they do not participate in athletics, but there is one for the wealthy (τοῖς εὐπόροις), with the result that the latter do take part because of the fine, while the former, not fearing a fine, do not take part” (Politics 1297a30). On the other hand, we possess ample evidence that athletes from poor families competed successfully at ancient athletic festivals. Aristotle himself quotes, in another passage, an epigram honoring an Olympic victor who boasts, “I used to carry fish from Argos to Tegea, bearing a rough basket upon my shoulders” (Rhetoric 1365a = Simonides 163 Bergk).

David Young has made the most extensive case in favor of social and economic mobility through sport (Young, 1984, p. 158-62). Appealing to instances cooks, goatherds, and farmers’ sons winning at Olympia–Polymnestor of Miletus, for instance, who once “chased and caught a rabbit while shepherding” (Eusebius, Chronica 73) and won the boys’ stadion race in the 46th Olympiad (596 BCE)–Young argues that young athletes especially could win large purses, significant enough to finance successful athletic careers. Historians responding to Young’s hypotheses have observed that a sizeable majority of known Athenian athletes from the period 594-490 BCE were noble, suggesting that athletics (at least in one, extensively documented Greek state) remained elitist. Donald Kyle, for instance, has shown that all but four of the twenty-one identifiable Athenian athletes from the period were from known noble families (Kyle, 1987, p. 102-23, with references to Davies, 1971; cf. Kyle, 2007, p. 205-10).²¹ Mark Golden, on the other hand, acknowledges that the growth of local and regional festivals provided opportunities for young athletes to launch athletic careers, leading to financial rewards and social privileges; but (like Young) he struggles to locate concrete evidence for this trajectory among the known careers of ancient athletes. Two possible examples known from inscriptions include Photion, a boxer whose career began as a youth in the 160s CE with victories at the Epheseia (Ephesus) near his native town of Leodicea, and L. Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus, a wrestler and pankratiast from Oenoanda (Lycia); but in neither case does the evidence reveal whether these youths needed their early victories to finance later successes, and in fact Flavillianus appears to belong to a prominent, perhaps aristocratic, family (Golden, 2008, p. 32-3). The sources resist certainty: it is clear that some successful athletes were not members of the aristocracy, but unknown whether they financed successful careers through early victories at local and regional contests; at the same time, other athletes did launch successful careers with youthful victories at local and regional contests, but unknown whether or not they were not aristocrats.

A related line of investigation considers sport’s potential to promote democratic ideologies, including egalitarianism and unity among politically-active classes. Paul Christesen connects the spread and popularization of athletics in Greece from the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE with trend (also beginning after 700 BCE) towards democratizing sociopolitical systems, and he examines four mechanisms through which sport fostered unity among participants in these democratizing communities: “by serving as a model of and for egalitarian relationships, by promoting meritocratic status competition, by acting as a source of social capital, and by promoting group closure” (2014, p. 213; 221-6). Christesen’s argument answers Kyle’s challenge–“social change influenced sport more than sport influenced social change” (Kyle, 2007, p. 209)–and argues that sport promoted democratization, paradoxically, by serving to establish social boundaries (“group closure”) between newly-empowered groups and those still excluded from power. The development and spread of athletic competitions can thereby be linked with the gradual inclusion of larger groups of citizens within political regimes. Moreover, as Nick Fisher has explored in detail, athletics even made it possible for athletes to gain citizenship in certain Hellenic communities, especially the wealthy and ambitious cities of and Southern Italy and Sicily (Croton, Syracuse, Himera), but perhaps Corinth, Argos, and Aegina as well (Fisher, 2018, p. 211-23).

Did athletic recreation, training, and competition promote a level playing field and reflect (or perhaps, even, facilitate) the restructuring of ancient society towards more egalitarian frameworks? We cannot be sure. While the bulk of evidence for athletic activity and competition involves wealthy individuals and families, it is no longer assumed that participation and success in athletics was limited to the wealthiest, but to an expanding group of free citizens. In an unpublished, but fascinating conference paper, Cameron Pearson (2019) has argued that citizens of most Archaic poleis were eligible competitors in athletic contests, and that athletics should not be considered part of an aristocratic or elite ideology, but of a civic ideology. Pearson embraces Edward Harris’ model for social mobility which distinguishes between a liturgical class, based on wealth, and a social class based on cultural capital (Pearson, 2019, p. 2; Harris, 1995). According to this view, membership in the social class of kaloi kagathoi was not a matter of wealth but life-style, and participation (and especially, one would expect, success) in the life of the gymnasium was one path to acceptance (Harris, 1995, p. 19-20, and 182 n. 8).²² Harris forcefully rejects the vision of a rigid, hereditary nobility or aristocracy, possessing vast wealth and privilege, and instead proposes the existence of informal and porous status groups, sharing a common life-style and common aspirations. This vision for group membership supports Christesen’s argument as well, in which sport functions as a source of social capital. Building on recent work in sport sociology, and drawing from seminal studies of American politics, Christesen credits sports with fostering interpersonal networks and solidarity in ways that can restructure rigid hierarchies into more egalitarian societies (Christesen, 2014, p. 224-6).

Reculturation

In Christesen’s view, sport brings about structural changes by offering contexts for modeling idealized social relations. Sport’s restructuring potential, therefore, rests on its ability to transform people’s thinking through ritualized activity: “the behavior enacted in ritualized activities,” he explains, “teaches habits and dispositions that shape the actions of individuals in all settings and thus serves as a model for activity outside the ritualized sphere” (Christesen, 2014, p. 222-3). By requiring competitors to interact as equals, athletics influenced their patterns of thought and behavior and facilitated the formation of egalitarian relations in other social realms. The same attitude is captured by Eustace Miles (1868-1948), an Olympian and classical scholar, who wrote in Let’s Play the Game (1904):

If anything is going to weed out snobbery from England, where also it is rife, that influence is play. For when you have been bowled by your groom, or charged over at football by your waiter, or neatly passed at hockey by your under-waiter, it is almost impossible for you to bully him, or ignore him as a human being, in the future. (Miles, 1904, p. 65, with emphasis in the original)

Miles’ admonitory reflection on sport and English class relations responded derisively to the “snobbery” and elitism behind the developing concept of amateurism, which sought explicitly to segregate competitive athletes by social class–and in many ways succeeded in doing so for over a century.²³ Removing exclusionary boundaries in sport, Miles promises, will transform participants’ attitudes towards one another and positively reshape their behavior. This intellectual transformation is directly related to Galtung’s fourth objective: reculturation, the replacement of a culture of violence with a culture of non-violence. In particular, Galtung emphasizes the role of peaceworkers in stimulating and leading discussions and debates (“the lungs of a democratic society”) (Galtung, 1998, p. 61-3). What role can athletics play in transforming the mental and cultural frameworks of conflict and violence into those of positive peace and equality?

Many SDP programs aimed at youth in post-conflict societies aim not only to provide necessary safe spaces (as in the case of Guatemala’s “Hoodwinks”, discussed above), but also to foster important life skills and redefine values. An unusual example of this sort of program is “Seedbeds of Peace” (Semillas de la Paz) based in Medellin, Colombia. During the early 1990s the drug trafficking activities of Pablo Escobar and his Medellin Cartel brought violence, terror, and corruption to the city. Although nearly three decades have now passed, the drug traffickers have left a complex cultural legacy that leaves disadvantaged children vulnerable to criminal activities from an increasingly early age. To address this social problem, the Conconcreto Foundation has leveraged Colombia’s passion for football in its “Seedbeds of Peace” program. Boys and girls join the program in equal numbers, some as young as seven to ten years, and participate for an average of five years, though some remain involved until they leave school at seventeen to nineteen. In a recent case study, Stephen Hills, Alejandro Gómez Velásquez, Matthew Walker examines how the program uses football as an analogy to teach life skills and redefine moral values (Hills, Gómez Velásquez, and Walker, 2018). When the group’s fieldwork was undertaken, the program was operating in nine Medellin neighborhoods, with twenty-five distinct age-groups consisting of 995 children.

In contrast to many sport-for peace initiatives, in which sport functions as a distraction or a hook, “Seedbeds of Peace” used football scenarios as analogies for real life scenarios.²⁴ Coaches designed football activities that facilitated direct comparisons to non-sporting contexts in order to teach life skill principles and reflect upon moral dilemmas. Furthermore, they required participants to discuss and reflect on their learning. For example, to support a discussion about ethical decision making, coaches modified a familiar shooting drill, whose aim was to shoot the football accurately to marked corners of the goal. Participants took shots under two different conditions: first, after received the ball from the coach, they were required to shoot without controlling it first; then, participants were asked to trap and control the ball first, with coaches encouraging them to evaluate and consider their options before executing their shot on goal. A discussion led by the coaches immediately following several rounds of this drill. The authors of the case study describe the discussion as follows:

Reflection involved participants sitting quietly and the coach addressing questions to the group. Those who wanted to answer would raise their hand and the coach would select one to three participants to answer each question. The participants were asked whether they were more effective and accurate when they tried to hit their shot the first time, or after they controlled the ball and took their time before shooting. As expected, participants generally responded that they were more accurate and effective when using control and taking their time. (Hills, Gómez Velásquez, and Walker, 2018, p. 31-2)

The open discussion cements the connection between the football drill and the lived experience of at-risk youth, while at the same time helping to establish habits of thought and reflection that inform daily decision-making. The analogy between sport and ethical living is even more concretely established in other football games and drills that explicitly delivered lessons through creative messaging: “use your head, don’t take drugs”, “tackle wrong decisions”, “analyze situations to make a good move”, “score your life goals” and “give drugs the red card” (Hills, Gómez Velásquez, and Walker, 2018, p. 32-3). By linking life lessons to familiar athletic skills and drills, these activities build habits of mind and promote cultural change.

The reshaping of a culture of violence into one of reconciliation is the thematic core of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Despite its apparent focus on the royal family of Argos, the trilogy, first staged in 458 BCE, that dramatizes the effects on both individual and community of a destructive, multigenerational cycle of violence. Michael Poliakoff has observed how metaphors drawn from wrestling serve function to unify the different levels of action in the three plays (Poliakoff, 1980).²⁵ Aeschylus’s widespread use of wrestling imagery throughout the Oresteia (in contrast to merely three clear references to wrestling in the other surviving plays and fragments) suggests that the concept wrestling performs a unique function in the trilogy. In the first instance of such imagery, from the choral entry song (parodos) of Agamemnon, the Chorus describes the hardships of the Trojan war as “many limb-exhausting wrestling matches, with knees driven into the dust” (πολλὰ παλαίσματα καὶ γυιοβαρῆ | γόνατος κονίαισιν ἐρειδομένου, Ag. 63-5). The two-line metaphor is evocative, featuring a characteristically Aeschylean coinage γυιοβαρῆ (lit. “limb-heavy”) and a vivid allusion to the physical toil of a wrestling match. The image establishes an analogy between the sport and the forms of violence and conflict dramatized in the plays. In Agamemnon, Zeus directs the violence of war “against Paris” (ἐπ᾽ Ἀλεξάνδρῳ, Ag. 61), and shortly afterwards he is described as a victor in wrestling (τριακτῆρος, Ag. 171) against his father Kronos. In Agamemnon, the physicality represented by the wrestling metaphor is paramount, as when Cassandra, describing her rape by Apollo, calls him “very much a wrestler” (παλαιστὴς κάρτ᾽, Ag. 1206). Aeschylus maintains this emphasis in Libation Bearers, with both Electra and Clytemnestra alluding to wrestling in descriptions of their family’s misfortunes: Electra wonders “whether the destruction is not unable-to-be-thrown-three-times” (οὐκ ἀτρίακτος ἄτα; Cho. 339), and when Clytemnestra is told (a false narrative) of Orestes death, she invokes “the irresistible (lit. hard-to-wrestle-with) Curse of this house” (ὦ δυσπάλαιστε τῶνδε δωμάτων Ἀρά, Cho. 692).

In Eumenides, the Chorus of Erinyes remains committed to the same system of retributive, violent justice established by the first two plays. In a vivid simile, leading up to the trial of Orestes, the Chorus (using language that echoes Electra’s and Clytemnestra’s words in Libation Bearers) compares the fate of the guilty to a shipwrecked sailor, struggling “in the midst of an irresistible eddy” (ἐν μέσᾳ | δυσπαλεῖ τε δίνᾳ, 558-9). A striking instance occurs during the trial scene itself. When Orestes admits that he killed his mother (ἔκτεινα: τούτου δ᾽ οὔτις ἄρνησις πέλει, 588), the Chorus of Erinyes declares that this is “already the first of the three wrestling-throws” (ἓν μὲν τόδ᾽ ἤδη τῶν τριῶν παλαισμάτων, 589), a reference to the three legal throws required to win a wrestling match.²⁶ Orestes defiantly rejects their claim, “you boast, but I am not yet fallen” (οὐ κειμένῳ πω τόνδε κομπάζεις λόγον, 590). While the image remains combative, the emphasis has shifted from the arbitrary, violence of the first and second plays, to a regulated contest with competitors invoking the rules of play. The passage makes a memorable analogy between sport and the legal process being established in the final play; but in contrast to the violence of Agamemnon and Libation Bearers, the metaphor here reflects the inadequacy of physical violence to resolve conflict. Instead, the reference to the rules of wrestling (and not to the sport’s violence) reflects the play’s establishment of new forms of authority. At the conclusion of the trial scene, the image even becomes propitious. Orestes’ departing words are a prayer for the Athenians’ safety and military success: “may your wrestling-hold be inescapable for your opponents, a source of safety and bringer of victory in war” (πάλαισμ᾽ ἄφυκτον τοῖς ἐναντίοις ἔχοις, | σωτήριόν τε καὶ δορὸς νικηφόρον, 776-7).

Poliakoff argues that Aeschylus’s deployment of wrestling imagery in the Oresteia displays “an evolution from divine and human discord to compromise and arbitration” (Poliakoff, 1980, p. 255). This reading corresponds with interpretations that emphasize a triumphant transition from a “pre-civilized” system of justice-seeking through vengeance and vendetta to another through popular sovereignty and the rule of law.²⁷ From this perspective, the Oresteia dramatizes a moment of transitional justice, bridging a culture of violence with one that adheres to the rules of law, and wrestling plays an important role in Aeschylus’ characterization of that process. But that is only part of the picture. In fact, the much-celebrated trial does not settle the conflict with the Erinyes, but rather exacerbates it, promising to unleash further violence and suffering on the community (778-92, 808-22). What does eventually win over the Erinyes is the patience and persistence of Athens–“I will not grow weary of saying nice things to you” (οὔτοι καμοῦμαί σοι λέγουσα τἀγαθά, 881)–whose persuasive, inclusive approach in the post-trial scene resembles restorative justice practices. As Dugdale and Gerstbauer have observed, the concluding dialogue between Athena and the embittered Erinyes addresses the needs of the defeated party, restoring their reputation and reintegrate them into the community in ways that empower them (Dugdale and Gerstbauer, 2017).

Aeschylus’s use of wrestling as an analogy for the legal proceeding in Eumenides illustrates the utility and value of linking concepts of peacemaking and conflict resolution with the rules and skills of popular sports. Like the coaches in the Colombian “Seedbeds” program, Aeschylus appropriates familiar features of popular sport to craft positive messages for a post-conflict society. In this way, the Oresteia may be read as dramatizing a moment of reculturation from violence to reconciliation, in which imagery drawn from wrestling plays an important, though ultimately not decisive, role. This case study therefore illustrates the limitations of sport-based interventions, suggesting that they are most effective when combined with other means of reconciliation and relationship-building. Both “Seedbeds of Peace” and the Oresteia illustrate how sport can be used in an integrated manner that increases its influence within a broader system of change.

Conclusion

In exploring these four objectives for post-conflict reconstruction, each with parallels in antiquity, this paper has sought to offer a provisional guide to what sport might successfully contribute to peacebuilding, once the focus on the relations between nation-states is put aside. While the phenomenon of international athletics may hardly have diminished the intensity of interstate conflicts, either in antiquity or today, sport-based interventions at interpersonal, local, and regional scales have been shown to foster positive outcomes. In each case-study, ancient and contemporary sources illustrate how athletics can build or restore relationships between individuals, to reintegrate disarmed combatants, and to strengthen communities. That is not to claim that SDP interventions are immune from criticism. On the contrary, SDP practitioners and proponents confront a suite of ethical challenges. Some critics have observed that aid providers do not always properly position aid recipients to take long-term ownership of the projects, and that has led some to question whether SDP programs are another form or neo-imperialism. Others critique the functionalist nature of SDP programs, which address the problems perceived by individual parties, using sport to “get kids off the street”, but are not designed to change complex structural problems, such as racism and economic inequality, that are often the main causes of conflict.²⁸ Still others question the popular assumptions, underlying many SDP programs for youth, that sport “builds character” through attempts to teach “proper values”, and again, question the imposition of undesired or unfamiliar norms, values, and institutions with little regard to cultural difference. Finally, because the Olympic philosophy of peace through sport, which lends legitimacy and credibility to the SDP sector, relies on an incomplete, outdated, and in many ways problematic understanding of ancient sporting culture, one must wonder whether this fact does not vitiate the entire project. Coubertin himself invoked “the immense prestige of antiquity” to promote his vision of physical and moral education, drawing from the same reservoir of eurocentric classicism that legitimized colonial and neo-colonial systems of education.²⁹ If SDP programs are to meet their potential, helping post-conflict societies to heal and rebuild, practitioners must wrestle with these ethical questions and learn the troubling history of colonialism. This essay is offered therefore as a preliminary intervention attempting to outline these and other challenges through the interpretive lens of antiquity.

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