At the turn of the last century, the modern Olympic and FIFA movements were launched in the context of declining empires, global economic crises, and ceaseless wars. Their explicit aim was to produce a new kind of peaceful world order. These movements were founded on the theory that by providing healthful, demilitarized spaces where the youth of the world could realize their potential, they would come to embody a new kind of non-nationalistic, peaceful breed of humanity.
Yet the fact we have seen in changes recent decades to the treatment of young people in public spaces, particularly around such international sporting events, raises questions about the implementation of this humanitarian vision. In western democracies young people from certain social, economic and ethnic backgrounds have been widely criminalized and deemed undesirable. Recent sports mega events around the world have used repressive and militarized policing to exclude local young people and present the world’s tourists and media with a rose-tinted view of the host communities – snubbing those who should stand to benefit most from such an event in their city.
How can public policy makers, youth organizations and event organizers ensure that the arrival of these sports mega-events, which are almost universally heralded as economic and social opportunities for their host communities, do not isolate, exclude and target local underprivileged youth. Issues around how young people use public space and the provisions that governments, police and communities make for them to do so are longstanding and important questions which become even more crucial when the World Cup or Olympics comes to town.
The conference “Sport Mega-Events and the Crisis of Youth Exclusion”, hosted by Goldsmiths University and the Open Society Foundations, brings together youth activists, policy innovators and academic specialists to explore these issues. By looking back to the recent experiences of World Cup and Olympic hosts South Africa, Germany and Beijing, and looking forward to upcoming sports mega-events in London and Rio de Janeiro, we hope to generate new proposals for the promotion of young people’s interests in these giant international spectacles. We will report from the conference on Twitter, Facebook and youthpolicy.org. More conference details are available at http://youthandsport.idebate.org/.