 Once again, thank you all for coming to our event, Sports and Peace Building, and I'd like to invite our Executive Vice President Tara Sunshine to introduce the event. Thank you. Good morning to all. I must say this is a new experience to be introducing a panel discussion on sports and peace building. But actually, there's nothing I would rather be doing this morning, except maybe on a tennis court playing doubles, and I'm sure there are going to be many analogies of such today. For those of you who don't know us as well as others, the Institute of Peace was founded in 1984, and our mission and mandate is really to work on prevention and management resolution of international conflicts overseas, and to deal with the aftermath and post-conflict stability problems that arise out of the ashes of conflict. And we are congressionally funded, congressionally mandated, and we really work at that intersection between think and do. So we take ideas, an intellectual product, and we put them through our mental mill, and then they go out into the field where conflict is actually taking place. We have offices in Kabul and Baghdad. We work on the Middle East and in Sudan, in Asia, in just about everywhere, where the potential for violent conflict or where violent conflict actually exists. So we've been in the field, we have not been on the field as much in terms of this sports and peace building area, but we have done work on some of the major tenets that drive the, in a sense, same concepts about what drives conflict and what are the inherent strategies, tools, and approaches that can reduce levels of violence and that can bring positive outcomes. We recognize that sports, like many fields that we work in, can have positive and negative dimensions to this. There's a lot of positive energy in the sporting arena, and there certainly can be negative energy. I will tell you that we begin, I think, with some healthy skepticism, and that's how we approach all of our new and innovative fields. We have recently expanded our work in gender and youth and security sector, and with each step we take we ask the hard questions. Is this in our lane? Is this an outgrowth of our mission? Can we make a difference? Can this be subjected to hard data and impact and assessment beyond anecdotal evidence and good feel stories? So we welcome that kind of scrutiny, making sure that we expend energies and resources appropriately to really drive what we're looking for, which are innovative solutions and publications and product and leveraging around this. So I'm very glad that we could bring our convening power today to this subject with all of you great experts. It's probably going to be hard to have discussion on such a physical topic when you're stuck in chairs in this room, but somehow I think we'll manage. So I'm very delighted and honored to turn things over to my colleague, Mike Lexen, and look forward to seeing where this leads us. Thanks so much, and thank you for being here this morning. Thank you, Tara, and let me join Tara in welcoming all of you here to the U.S. Institute of Peace for this, from our perspective at least, inaugural event. We know many institutions already are looking at sports and peace building, and as Tara said, it's an area we are interested in exploring. We see this meeting this morning and today as an opportunity for us to become a little more aware of everything that's going on, but we believe everyone here can benefit by having an opportunity to hear and exchange views with a lot of real experts in the field coming from a diverse set of backgrounds and experience. We will do our best to keep everything on the schedule as indicated. If it says there's going to be a break, we would intend to have a break if the discussion is going so dramatically and dynamically that it goes over in a minute or two, we will try to make that up to you. If everything has been said and everyone has said it, we won't insist on waiting until the last minute according to the schedule in order to do the break, but we will try to keep to the schedule as much as we can. The first panel is going to talk about a historical look at sports and peace building. The organization of how we will structure this is each of the panelists will have approximately 15 minutes to present his points. After that, we'll take a minute or two for the panelists to react to what each other, what each of them has said. And then we do really want to make this a dialogue and interchange. And at that point, I would like to open it up to questions, comments from the floor. We have set up microphones to the left and right of where you're seated at the time that questions, comments, reactions, and so forth from the floor are in order. We would ask that those of you interested in participating in that way make your way to the microphone if there's more than one person. It will be a line. We'll go back and forth. Should be an opportunity for everyone who wishes to say something to be able to say it, we hope so at least, but for the beginning of this, we would like to have the speakers able to talk without having interruptions in the course of their initial presentations at least. So we will also ask the speakers to go to the podium for the initial part. Our layout here is not quite as dramatic or maybe dramatic. It's not quite as user-friendly as it could be. When all of you get a chance to join us in our new building sometime next year, you'll see that we have conference facilities which have better lines of sight, if nothing else, and perhaps look a little more architecturally interesting. Our first speaker who will give us an overview combines both academic and government experience. It's Dr. Victor Cha, who is the Dia Song Professor of Government and Director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University. Dr. Cha is also Senior Advisor and inaugural holder of the Korea Chair at CSIS, so not just academic and government, but also think-tank experience. And he was Director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council for the White House. He's the author or co-author of numerous books and articles. He won't be able to be with us the whole day. He's in demand talking about Korea this afternoon, but I'd like to take advantage of having him here for as long as we can. And I'll now turn it over to Dr. Cha to give us an overview of the historical look at sports and peace filming. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. It's really a pleasure to be here. I'm actually a frequent visitor to CSIS for completely other reasons having to do with East Asia and North Korea, so I'm really happy to be here in this context and be on such a strong panel of experts. I don't really consider myself an expert on this topic. Just because you write a book on it doesn't mean you're an expert on it. I got into this field largely almost by accident when I left the government in 2007 and I came back to Georgetown. In government, I had been working on all the things I had been researching as a scholar, East Asian security, the North Korea problem I negotiated for the U.S. on the six-party talks. So when I returned to government, the last thing I wanted to do was write about this stuff again because I had been living and breathing it for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But I did have this one folder in my drawer that was entitled sports and international relations. Every time I came across something, I just kept throwing it in the folder and I thought this was as good a time as any to look at this topic. This was also in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, so I thought sports and politics would be a fantastic topic to write on at this particular time, and that's what I did. My overview is essentially a look at how we think about sports and international relations. George Orwell in 1945 wrote a piece where he described sports as, quote, war minus the shooting, unquote, which is typical Orwell. But at the same time, it made a very interesting point about the connections between sports and politics. We play sport. We play it as kids. Our kids play sports every weekend. We play it as adults. It's a part of our life. It's a part of the life of almost every human being on the face of this planet. International relations is about the study of nation-state behavior, but these nation-states are composed of individuals that interact with one another. So it's astounding actually in many ways that the study of international relations has really, especially the study of international relations in the United States, has really not looked at the link between sports and politics, given the fact that sports plays an important part of almost everybody's livelihood that is involved in the world today. This is not the case in Europe. In Europe there has been more studies of the relationship between sports and politics, but not so much in the United States. So what I'm going to try to do is at least talk about a few themes about the way I think we have thought historically about the relationship between sports and politics. And again, I commend the U.S. Institute of Peace for undertaking this project. I mean, USIP is known very well for a number of projects, very cutting edge in terms of the way they look at problems around the world, and so really I commend you for taking on this topic. So one way in which I think sports and politics are interlinked is one that's probably pretty obvious to many people. It's essentially the implicit assumption of the intellectual inquiry of today's conference, which is the relationship between sports and peace. The most famous example of this is this concept of the Olympic truce, the notion that when the games begin, when the athletes come together, the assumption is that there is a universal truth. Everybody stops fighting in order to enjoy the games. The first Olympics was one in which the three kings, and I can't remember when it was, sometimes something BC, when the three kings all agreed that there would be a truce that would allow individuals from the different kingdoms to walk through the streets of others' territories while the Olympic truce was on, while the festival was going on. And all of us, I think, as we go through these, can think of examples in the way sports and peace or peace-building may be interlinked, but this is sort of the original, right? The very first pre-modern Olympic games brought about this notion of the Olympic truce. The obverse of that is also true, and that is the link between sports and conflict. In many ways, sports can be a prism through which international conflict, political conflict, and historical antagonisms get refracted. Probably the most well-known example of this for people of my generation and older, and I may not look old, but I'm ancient, was the Cold War, right? Because during the Cold War, all of you remember, the Olympics, in many ways, was about the competition between the eastern and the western blocks, and that victories, measured in terms of gold medals or silver medals, in many ways represented or was supposed to represent the superiority of one system over another. As we all know, the eastern block took this to the extreme, right? Really, initially the Soviets weren't very interested in sports, and they didn't participate in the Olympics initially, but they made the decision to turn the Olympics into an event in which they would demonstrate the superiority of the system through the superiority of their athletes, and they divided the entire eastern block in terms of, you know, it was a division of labor. The Romanians were responsible for this. The East Germans were responsible for recruiting. Another group was responsible for medicine, right? So there was all sorts of things that they did to try to make this a, not just a national project, but a project that had strong political, had strong political messages attached to it. And that was if the Soviets and the eastern block did better in terms of won more gold medals, it was a sign about how their system was superior. Another example of this, I think, well known to many people who've studied what it was in 1956, something known as the Blood in the Water Match, which was a water polo match between the, I think it was the semifinals between Soviet Union and Hungary. This again was 1956, just after the invasion of Hungary, and so this was about much more than a water polo. And there were fights that broke out, and it's called the Blood in the Water, because there was fighting among the players in which blood was spilled, and the water in the pool turned the pool pink, as well as fighting in the stands. The area that I like to look at quite often is Asia, and in Asia we have lots of examples of this, all of them related largely to historical animosity, unredeemed resentments, and historical antagonism that still exists in Asia. To put it very simply, whenever there is an important sports match that involves Japan, everybody wants to beat Japan, because Japan is a former colonizer of the region, many feel that it hasn't apologized to the past, like Germany has, so these matches become real grudge matches. And there's a famous example of this in the 2004 or 2006 World Cup regionals in which China was playing Japan in the finals of this match, and the Japanese coach after the game protested the game, because the Chinese players were just playing very physical. And the umpire was not yellow carding or red carding anybody, it was a very, very physical match in which they were taking down players. And then afterwards, even though the Japanese won, there were protests outside, protesters who were trying to block Japanese VIP cars from leaving the stadium. Well, it turns out that the Chinese were playing dirty, and the umpires were not really calling anything because the umpires were from North Korea. So sports and politics when it comes to Asia also is extremely intense and extremely political. And in the book, in my book I actually talk about why I think it's actually more political in Asia than it is in other parts of the world, but that's not something that we need to talk about right now. So a third area in which sports and politics are interlinked is in terms of terrorism. Unfortunately, sports has been a target of terrorism. All of us know this today because we hear about the tremendous sums of money that are put into preparing security for the Olympics or for any major sporting event. But this was not always the case. And in many ways, in retrospect we now understand that sports was really, it was and is really an ideal target for terrorist activities, particularly international sporting events where you have athletes that are wearing the colors of their nation that represent the personification of their nation become easy targets for terrorists. In addition to this, again until very recently, sporting venues were very, very what we would call in national security terms very soft targets for terrorism, basically wide open. And they are highly publicized events. So in many ways if terrorists want to create terror, if they want to send a message, sporting events become an ideal target for this. I think the event that we are most familiar with in terms of this was the 1972 Olympics in Munich, a tragic event. But one that you are probably less familiar with was again from Asia was in 1987 because in 1987 a South Korean passenger airliner was blown up as it was flying over the Andaman Sea, killing all the passengers on board. And it was blown up by a North Korean terrorist because the North Koreans were basically trying to sabotage South Korea's hosting of the Olympic Games the following year in September of 1988. And for this reason we see lots and lots of security now associated with sporting events precisely because probably the ultimate disaster for sports aficionados and people who see sport as being apolitical is for it to be used for terrorist purposes. A fourth area in which sports and politics are interlinked is in terms of nation building. It's really difficult to separate sports and national identity. The reason many countries or cities covet things like the Olympics or the World Cup is they don't just see these as business ventures. In fact the history of this, the history of the Olympics really up until the LA Games was that sporting events like the Olympics were actually money losers in the end. The cities that hosted them generally ended up doing very poorly financially after them. And it was really not until 1984 when the Olympics were hosted in Los Angeles and a private business model was basically created for the Olympics that these turned into more profitable ventures. But still everybody wants these things because the cachet of being an Olympic city or being a country that hosted the World Cup is irresistible I think to many leaders. Internally within the politics of each country, politicians, governors, mayors seek out these big events because it becomes a way to basically try to either obtain federal funding for projects that they may be interested in pursuing or try to speed up government funding, either infrastructure projects or city cleanup projects that they are interested in. So it becomes a very important part of the city's identity and a very important part of a nation's identity. The quintessential example of this is obviously the Beijing Olympics. The 2008 Beijing Olympics for the Chinese were not just a sporting event, this was supposed to be the crowning achievement of basically 30 years of modernization from Deng Xiaoping onwards. It was supposed to represent China's coming out party, its emergence on the global stage as a major player in World Affairs and the amount of work that went into building these ultra-super-hyper-modern facilities, the water cube, the bird's nest, all of these things, it was really meant to convey an image to the world of here when you think of China, you think of the water cube and you think of the Great Wall of China. So it was about modernity and civilization and they were trying to put everybody in awe of China's growth, its rise, plus the fact that it is this ancient civilization. Now we can discuss whether they agreed on accomplishing this task. I think in many ways the Beijing Olympics were very much of a Potemkin village in the sense that they worked so hard to make it perfect, in many ways it was almost too perfect and the effort at perfection really revealed a lot of the flaws that were associated with these games. Nevertheless, we can certainly discuss that. Nevertheless, clearly big, what in the literature are called mega sporting events are often very much associated with how a nation defines itself and how it wants to project its image to the world. In the Chinese case, not just project an image to the world, but also project an image to its own people. The Olympics for China was as much about the legitimacy of the state and the legitimacy of the Communist Party in the eyes of a younger generation of Chinese who don't see their path to the top. In the olden days you asked a young bright Chinese student what he wanted to be or what his path to the top would be, it would be join the party. Now you ask young Chinese what they're like going to business, to start an internet company. It's not the party anymore. So in many ways the Olympics, the Chinese was as much about demonstrating to their own people the legitimacy of the state and the state's ability to fulfill their end of the social contract. Okay, I have a two minute warning which is perfect. The next and last area I think when we talk about sports and politics is the relationship between sports and diplomacy. And here essentially the idea is that sporting events or sports have a way of creating opportunities for diplomatic breakthroughs when decades of regular diplomacy have been unsuccessful. The quintessential example of this often referred to in the literature is ping-pong diplomacy and Nixon's opening to China. The idea that the United States largely through the invitation of the U.S. ping-pong team who had been playing in the World Championships in Nagoya, Japan were offered to come to Beijing for some exhibition matches. These were about the most unlikely diplomats that you could ever imagine. A Westinghouse executive, a housewife, a hippie from Santa Monica, you know, table tennis in 1972 was not exactly a big sport in the United States. So the U.S. went to these games and just got creamed, I mean just got completely creamed but then had the opportunity to go to Beijing where the Joe Enlai, the Prime Minister, met them and it became what many see as the start of U.S. China rapprochement in the U.N. to China. Now the analytic point I would make here is simply that we often associate sporting events like the ping-pong diplomacy with big diplomatic breakthroughs. But if you actually research this, the reality is that there have to be, these things can be helpful in taking you across the goal line, if you will. And there has to be some underlying diplomatic currents or underlying forces that are moving in the direction of some sort of diplomatic breakthrough. That is actually when sports can be very helpful and the reason it can be helpful is it becomes a high-profile event in which politicians and policymakers can determine what the general attitude is among their publics. So in the case of Nixon in China, Nixon had always been interested in opening with China and there had been a secret dialogue taking place between Kissinger and the Chinese. But they had not made this public yet. This was all happening simultaneous with the invitation to the ping-pong team. So when the ping-pong team went, Time Magazine was there, there was this famous cover. The AT&T registered their first phone call from China when one of the guys on the team wanted to call his mom back home. All this created a lot of positive views in the press and in the public. And what this had the effect of doing is giving the Nixon administration confidence to move forward with this initiative more publicly in many ways also to help them circumvent, you know, the Taiwan lobby that was in the United States that didn't want to see an opening to China. And so this is where diplomatic efforts can be, sporting events can be most effective when there is some sort of undercurrent. One anecdote I will give you from my days in government was I was once sent to North Korea while I was at the White House to negotiate the remains of missing American servicemen that had been killed in the Korean War. So we negotiated successfully the return of six sets of remains. What nobody told me was that even though I flew Miller into Pyongyang, we were not flying Miller back. So I had the six Pelican cases of remains and I was like, how am I going to bring these back? And the North Korean said, it's okay, we'll just drive you. So they drove me to the DMZ and drove me through, you know, and then basically we drove through the DMZ to Panmunjom, the joint security area and we transported the cases across. But the point of this was this was happening at a time where we were nowhere on six-party talks, right? Not good at all. And in this long drive from Pyongyang through the DMZ, it's about a two-and-a-half-hour drive, straight shot, really nothing to look at. They don't turn on the radio. They turn on my North Korean counterpart. So we started talking about family and all sorts of other things and I didn't have any of my communication devices because they took those. So we talked and then we talked about sports. And we talked about the possibility one day of having the North Korean women's soccer team who are actually very good. They're quite competitive. The evening before when I turned on the television, the only thing aside from propaganda films of Kim Il-sung was the North Korean soccer team playing Taiwan. And they beat him like 8-0 or 8-2. So we talked about the idea of having the women's soccer. Because I said, hey, I teach at Georgetown. Georgetown is a good women's soccer team. And we talked about the idea of them touring around and playing some of the NCAA women's teams just as a sporting event. Of course, it was a nice idea but at the time there was nothing going on in terms of diplomacy, right? They weren't giving up their nuclear weapons or anything. So it didn't happen. But when things got a little better, like when they signed an agreement to denuclearize and we had inspectors up in Yongbyon in their facilities, an idea came through that wasn't about sports but it was about music. And as many of you may remember the New York Philharmonic went to Pyongyang to play. So that, you know, when you have the right concatenation of forces, both on the diplomatic side and the cultural and the cultural sports side, those are the chances where you can make diplomatic breakthroughs. So thank you for listening and I look forward to hearing the comments of the others and from you in the audience. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Chang. The next speaker will be Eric Deans. He's a liaison officer at the United Nations Office on Sport for Development and Peace in New York. He previously worked at UNESCO. He will provide a UN perspective, or a perspective from the UN on the issue we're talking about today sports and peace building. Eric. First of all, thank you very much United States Institute of Peace for the invitation and the opportunity to speak at this very important and interesting event. I would like to begin with a short five minute video clip that portrays what the UN and our office is doing in the field and then I will give you a very brief description of the tasks of our office and make a distinction between the different approaches of peace building through sport which I would call the macro and the micro approach to peace building through sport. And then if I have time I would like to give some examples, some concrete examples of the UN activities in that field and make some one or two important points what is missing in our activities in our field. And yes, so I would like to show you that video clip. New York, 2003 during the General Assembly of the United Nations a resolution on sport is submitted. The resolution is entitled sport as a means to promote education, health development and peace on November the 3rd, 2003 the resolution is adopted. Volunteers strive to implement the resolution on sport in some of the most dramatic situations. They've lost their friends they've lost their relatives so they will come here they will make friends. I think training is what will help them to improve their mental health. So in this place they will learn some things about life and how they can overcome their sorrow how they can help each other so I think it has a very good social role. A lot of successful projects have been set up in refugee camps for instance. Sport helps me a lot basketball makes me healthier and I have fun playing that's what I believe. I don't know what the future holds for me but I think I need to be ready for anything for any situation. That's why I'm trying my best to become a good basketball player and to be an educated person for my future. There are children here who every time you talk to them they talk about war and when they played games they played with make believe guns they played it being soldiers but when we introduce them to communication games group games little by little these same children try to forget about playing guns and soldiers and now they know that there are other games peaceful games games about living together that's the kind of change in behaviour I've seen here thanks to sport. When communication breaks down between communities sometimes the one place they can still meet is on the football field. We don't know each other but if we play a soccer match our relation automatically will be different after playing one hour together we learn to communicate each other without talking communicate with the people and to have a different relation. This is a good example how sport can bring people together sports unites them and brings people communities from different countries different nationalities, different tribes religions together. Sport as a means to promoting development and peace can help to achieve the millennium development goals. Sport is a language every one of us can speak when we do we can bridge social, economic religious and cultural divides we can help improve the well-being of individuals and communities we can inspire hope in ourselves and others. At the World Summit in 2005 all the world's governments declare that sport can foster peace and development and can contribute to an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding. That is why the United Nations is using sport as a cost effective tool to reach the millennium development goals the common vision adopted by all countries for a better world. And it is why the United Nations is turning to sport to support people recovering from armed conflict especially young people. Let us mobilize the power of sport in our quest for peace and development around the world. Thank you. As I already said I would like to give you a very quick description of our office. The UN Office on Sport for Development Peace was established in 2001 with the appointment of the first special advisor to the SG on Sport for Development Peace. In 2008 the second special advisor was appointed so it is a fairly new addition to the UN secretariat. And our office is supporting the mandate of the special advisor. He has a three fold mandate which is facilitator, advocate and representative. Advocacy is a very important field that we are involved in and we are trying to kind of convince first of all governments to mainstream sports into their development plans and priorities and internationally and national development plans and also within the UN system we are trying to keep sport on the agenda. Many UN agencies, funds and programs are using sports for development peace since many years facilitation means that we are facilitating contacts within the UN system and beyond. We are providing advice on best practices and bring actors together. Sometimes we also are engaged in fundraising but on a very modest level. And third representative of the special advisor since the UN system and the SG, the Secretary General at important sports events. So we are very small office. We have seven staff members and are financed through voluntary contributions by member states. We have a trust fund. So it's basically member states that finance our activities. We also host the international working group on sports development and peace which is an intergovernmental body that develops policy recommendations for governments. Governments sit together and work together with experts and observers to develop concrete recommendations how to use sport in development plans and programs on the country level. In this working group we also have a sub-thematic working group on sport for peace but we still have to find funding to launch this working group. We already started with different other working groups such as sport for youth and child development but there has to be one or two member states who take the lead in facilitating that working group. I would like to introduce a distinction between several approaches of sport for peacebuilding and Dr. Chao already mentioned the first dimension, the first approach which I would call the macro approach. It's the realm of bilateral relations of the Olympic truce that very old and idealistic concept revived by the International Olympic Comedy and at the UN we have the bi-annual General Assembly resolutions that are adopted unanimously by all member states that really request the member states to respect and observe the Olympic truce. So this realm is a very political one and full of symbols and using mega sports events and encounters on an elite level to promote friendship and good relations between nations and their societies. There's also what I would call the micro approach to peacebuilding for sport and this is taking place on the grassroots level using programs and really building on the so-called intrinsic values benefits social norms which everybody of us might know it's about fair play, about team spirit about promoting self-confidence, resilience and so on. So the UN the bulk of the UN activities is taking place in that realm of that micro approach. This has to do with the mandate of the UN and its programs, funds and special agencies who have really program driven and also because due to the fact that there is a general shift of conflict after the Cold War moving from international conflict to interstate conflict and here the UN has a special role to play in resolving conflict on a very grassroots level on a very community level. So one important point I wanted to make is that we need to move away from these anecdotes that exist in both realms within both approaches. You have the negative and the positive anecdotes Dr. Cha already referred to them but this does not bring us or the movement forward. We really need to move away from these anecdotes and promote evidence-based research and also develop a knowledge base to collect best, not best practice but good practices. I wouldn't go so far to call them best practices. Good practice that inspire program developers and program coordinators on the ground to develop specific programs that are adapted to the local needs and realities of the communities and the countries that we work in. Because very often sports for development piece uses a franchise approach for development piece building programs but it's important that we really go away from that and really adapt our programs to the local culture. Another point I wanted to stress is what might be quite interesting to you that within that micro approach that I just talked about the UN and especially the UN peacekeeping operations are using sport with two strategies. The one is sports events that attract a crowd an audience. Many people use it as a platform, as a medium to disseminate peace messages messages to promote a culture of peace to foster a nonviolent atmosphere especially in pre-election phases in the countries. So it's actually like a communication tool to really multiply messages and the second one is a more programmatic one that really has a pedagogical and programmatic goal such as to reconcile kind of former opponents communities to reintegrate child socials and this is a field that Dean will talk about later I think. And also within peacekeeping operations we now, since a couple of years we have a special role played by the armed forces of peacekeeping operations that are very useful in refurbishing or constructing sports facilities for local communities and some years ago the troops had their own sports facilities to promote the health of their troops but now there is also a shift from this very specific security mandates of troops towards more developmental activities. And this has also the positive effect that peacekeeping operations are more welcome by their host communities and to improve relations with them to work really well together. And for example a couple of examples would be from the peacekeeping operation there organized football matches that brought together the rebel troops together with the government forces troops. There was a peace agreement already in place so this is the basis for all these activities of the UN in post conflict countries but it was really interesting to see how how reunited for 90 minutes or longer kind of formal opponents even in the military wing can be through sport. In Haiti I just came back from Haiti a couple of days ago in Port-au-Prince the UN peacekeeping UN stabilization mission MINUSTA works together with youth gangs and introduces for futsal indoor football capoeira and dance to prevent youth from joining or they try to dismantle gangs through community activities and sport and also prevent youth from joining them it was very interesting to see how around sports events the mission together with a Brazilian NGO called Viva Rio has every year a peace between violent gangs to really resolve conflict in a peaceful way. So these are a couple of examples that the UN is undertaking on the Brasswood level and with that I think we're already behind in time I would like to have more time for an interactive discussion. Thank you. Our third speaker is Dr. Rovica is an assistant professor in the department of health and sports sciences at Salisbury University he's been the principal investigator for a long-term research project on the use of sport for children and youth in armed conflict settings especially focused on northern Uganda primary focus of his work overall is the role of sport in the reintegration of former child combatants topic that's already been mentioned a couple of times. It's an important specific area of interest in the nexus between sports conflict and peace building so Dr. Rovica the podium is yours. Thank you very much first of all I'm very pleased to be here at USIP I've been here a few times for several different events I've always been enriched by the work of USIP and come away from here even that much more knowledgeable so I hope that's the same for you today as well Thank you to everyone though for putting this together and what I think is an important aspect of peace building through sport so I hope to be able to provide you with some insights into the work that I've been doing for the past about half decade now and specifically in northern Uganda after laughter it's just about time just about five minutes ago I would have started a lecture at the university and believe me I'm very happy that you're a lot more spryer than my 10 a.m. class so thank you very much so I'm gonna go through this and hit on some points it's hard to put into 15 minutes five years worth of work and of course about 200 pages of data just quantitative at this point but I'm going to try and give you an overall view and of course open for many questions I'll be here all day so I hope I'll be able to provide you with some more answers but I have quite a long history in Africa when I was younger and I'm not ancient but I lived in nobody here is no I lived in East Africa and Tanzania and about that time was when the genocide in Rwanda began in 1994 and at that time a friend of mine whom we played badminton with on Monday nights was the director of UNICEF the country director at that time and had solicited people to really go and to help out because people didn't really know what was going on and even you were in a neighboring country you didn't know what was going on and when I asked her what I could do at that time she said do what you do best sport and I was like I didn't think I had really any type of credentials to do anything but we went to some of the refugee camps and we did we engaged the children and youth in the refugee camps who were faced with this idea of genocide in their country and did our best to provide activities for them and to bring about some type of normalcy to it did it work? I don't know but it didn't instill in me this idea of sport and peace and peace building and for the children which is extended into northern Uganda in June 2005 I visited northern Uganda which at the time was in the midst of a 20 year conflict as I sat under a tree at the Gusko interim care center for former abductees of the Lord's resistance army I listened intently as young boys and girls told their stories of abduction, rape, deprivation, brutality and violence they continued to share their concerns for their future and the anxiety they experienced over returning to their communities at the request of the center director the staff and I developed sport activities in which the children engaged each late afternoon this sport component took place just outside of the center in an open field adjacent to a local secondary school the only time the children left the confines of the center for programming purposes during the first evening of play a young boy leaving the nearby school to walk through the middle of the football match and I called out to him just to ensure his safety and that he noticed the space in which we were playing and he turned to me and he said mozungu which loosely translates to white men why do you waste your time with these rebels he asked me and proceeded to walk away from the area I spoke to the children at the center about this incident and asked them their feelings towards such a remark they stated their displeasure explaining how they were all randomly forced into child soldiering and perpetrated violence under a killer be killed state their public reactions to such cases of community stigma play an integral role in their successful reintegration approximately two weeks later however the same boy returned to our playing area and requested to me mozungu can I play noting the children's organizational skills they were these former combatants were empowered to organize their own activities at that point their focus and methods of fair play the boy joined in as did ultimately other children in youth setting forth my research with the role of sport in the reintegration of former child soldiers but now conflicts continue to dramatically alter the lives of children around the world over the last decade hundreds of thousands of children have engaged in various conflicts in different capacities forcible abductions continue to occur in a number of countries thrusting children into combat large numbers of children volunteer to armed groups under the duress of collapsed educational and economical infrastructures or after witnessing violence against immediate family or community members the experience of being a child soldier has particularly devastating consequences according to gender whether by way of forced abduction or recruitment conflicts put children at risk both physically and psychosocially the family and community response former child soldiers receive upon return can vary dramatically some return with physical disabilities as a result of land mines and imputations thus facing further community stigma the reintroduction of former child soldiers back in the community is a complex process that can often be unsuccessful the context of this field work in research is northern Uganda a region slowly emerging from one of Africa's longest running conflicts throughout the approximately 23 years of conflict where upwards of 60,000 children and youth were abducted and forced to take on various roles within the LRA including that of perpetrators of horrific violence against members of their community girls were often victims of sexual abuse and rape at times bearing children in the bush additionally the complex nature of this conflict forced hundreds of thousands of people into internally displaced persons camps that yielded threats to personal safety and little opportunity for education and income generating activities and tens of thousands of children known as night commuters desperate to avoid abduction and walk for miles to town center seeking protection producing an even more complex emergency sport interventions have been and remain a part of the demobilization disarmament and reintegration programs focusing mainly on the reintegration aspect returnees engage in sport activities that in term care centers as I described earlier while awaiting return to their families and communities the use of sport draws former combatants out of violent routines to the participation in a paradigm that is bound by socially acceptable behaviors current programs aimed at the reintegration process include the use of sociomotricity principles within the school setting for former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo this program involves the use of elementary games focused on teamwork and self control adventure based activities aimed at building empathetic dynamics within the group setting and team sports football programs were also introduced to former child soldier amputees in Liberia and former child soldiers associated with the LTTE in Sri Lanka participate in cricket programs along other marginalized children aimed at leadership skills and helping children appreciate the values of trust respect fair play and fair play off the cricket field these are just a number of code examples and I certainly don't endorse any of the programs I've been able to see some of the programs and stuff some of the literature and things like that and talk with people certainly I'm always pleased to see programs that are going on and seek to really try to investigate those programs and look at which what it is that they're doing and how they're doing it during the beginning observational phase of our research interviews with key stakeholders in the reintegration process yielded only vague responses to questions addressing the use of sport for former abductees seeking reintegration their responses mainly focused on the immediate effects of sport stating it had a calming effect on former abductees allowing them to sleep better at night, forgetting the past and showing decreased aggression towards others yet no scientific studies have yielded data to support these immediate effects of sport on returnees equally scarce as any data on the immediate and holistic effects of sport more aptly garnered from longer term engagement in community-based programs that is the use of sport as an educational and more acutely therapeutic tool ultimately leading to peaceful reintegration within the cultural context there is a need for more holistic community-based programs that include sport that are bound to the philosophical underpinnings of peaceful play within conflict affected regions especially for children and youth who lack the opportunity to attend school and benefit from the sport programming that schools have to offer just off script one of the findings that we found that the largest the venue in which children and youth were participating in sport was in school upwards of 85 86% of the children were participating in sport within the schools so there's a bit of complexity there though in the sense that and I'll mention it briefly but many former child soldiers don't have the opportunity to return to school so therefore they lack the opportunities to gain the benefits from sport if that is indeed the main venue as we discovered by utilizing sport as a means for social development young people from antagonistic population groups meet and communicate in a neutral space or on common ground as we've discussed earlier to the end of inciting a process of peace and social cohesion on a very public stage of sport our recent findings have also shown that male and female form abductees agreed that participation in sport was a significant factor in their acceptance of their peers within their communities former abductees found sport to be a means to reconnect them to the lives they experienced prior to their abduction by re-establishing a positive identity and non-abducted children and youth had a positive attitude towards engaging in sport with former abductees such as the case for young Samuel a 15 year old former abductee whose brief story I'll share with you Samuel was abducted by the LRA aged 12 for a period of 18 months he faced heinous levels of exposures to violence ultimately having his left arm hacked off by the rebels leaving him for dead in the bush after being found by the government forces and taken to an intern care center Samuel reunited with members of his immediate family and was able to return to school his athletic prowess despite his physical disability coupled with his strong leadership skills I might say developed while in the bush earned him the peer elected title of sport prefect at a school while this seems like a successful case of reintegration Samuel reported to us he was still viewed negatively by members of his village while sport addressed one outcome of reintegration at this point in time it failed to alleviate the stigma he experienced within his community despite the potential for sport as an agent for peace and social change sport is also a potential form of resistance to unleash violent behaviors given that the form of ductees were often viewed as overly aggressive individuals with violent tendencies within their communities we found that none of ductees were more likely to solve conflicts in sport by way of peaceful responses than their formerly abducted counterparts who engaged in more violent responses these the violent responses included instances of arguing fighting and retaliation while peaceful responses to conflicts that arose during engagement in sport activities included discussions seeking outside help and referring to existing rules we have to be careful with these findings though because we really do need to understand more of the cultural context and the operant systems in which the children navigate within their lives and we have to dig deeper for that while that was a quantitative finding we need to follow that up with more qualitative research in order to really dig deeper to know and understand why these responses were coming about whether sport facilitates the reintegration of former child soldiers depends upon its implementation for sport to contribute to healthy social development and reintegration programs must capitalize on the inherent qualities of sport such as fair play teamwork and fostering a supportive environment utilize disputes as teachable moments adopt culturally relevant strategies for resolving conflict and building trust and provide strategies for the transfer of these programmatic objectives to other pertinent aspects of children's lives longitudinal research on the reintegration of former child soldiers continues to emerge as countries transition from conflict to peace and stability similar research on the role of sport and the reintegration of former child soldiers remains sparse therefore we must continue to adopt research strategies that provide more evidence more of an evidence base about the long term of effects of sport experiences in the reintegration of former combatants in order to develop and test locally relevant and feasible interventions to avoid as we stated earlier just near anecdotal evidence the continuation of this research in northern Uganda challenges us as to whether we can provide positive outcomes of sport and reintegration amidst one of the most complex conflicts in the world and to add to the limited body of support for children in the body of knowledge excuse me of support for children in armed conflict through sport if positive outcomes can occur in a place as challenging as northern Uganda that would boost confidence that the findings and implications may have a positive effect on other young survivors of war thank you well again thanks to all three panelists what I would propose now is give each of them a chance if he wishes to comment on the remarks of the other two and then we will get into the more interactive part with as many of you as possible participating in this exchange so Dr. Chaud do you have any thoughts that you're inspired to add no I mean I enjoyed both Eric and Dean's presentations I don't know how much more I could add to that you know I think what it shows is that there are there are sort of there are micro and macro ways to look at this issue one is very much of a grassroots effort that works with individuals what resonates with me is sort of the idea of using disputes and sporting events as feasible moments for individuals that may have not had any of that sort of experience in the past at all that took everything in confrontational terms and I think many of the practitioners who work on this area are working very much at the micro level and then there is the macro level which looks at the way sporting events historically have played a role in either creating diplomatic helping to facilitate diplomatic breakthroughs between governments and so I think there are two very different lenses on this although both of them I think are useful thank you Eric any additional thoughts comments I think we all touched upon the need for research it's very important I've been talking to other development practitioners and they were kind of surprised to hear about our very frequent point that we make in the sport for development peace community that we need research I think it's also because we are struggling to be to convince others and I think research especially to convince donors to give funds is very important they need the evidence based research to really release the funds and we still deal with many people who are kind of skeptical towards that that whole movement despite the many success stories and positive anecdotal evidence so we really have to step up scientific research on that that's the point I would like to make now thank you we're going to see how far we'll go on that with the third panel this afternoon which is called Evaluation Scoring Peace Building Through Sports I suspect there will be a lively exchange and Dean any thoughts from the other I think kind of being a bit of an oddball at times I know within my field a lot of individuals ask me you know and I explain how this came about during a postdoctoral year in Uganda well in Uganda but by like I said by no means we have to be very careful that we also don't what I do is not an absolute and really trying to look at things within that cultural context and it may not transfer but hopefully that there will be some transference and I think that's also in terms of the program and programmatic interventions and I'm sure that we're going to hear a lot about that and I'm really looking forward to that well I'm looking forward to everything I'm happy to be here but I think that we have to be very careful about that the round peg and square hole and such that it's going to work here and I know I've been asked to come to different countries with children and youth in conflict and you know I've kind of stayed away from that right now and I want to do this right I mean that's the way I kind of look at it and I have mounds of data and I'm writing I am so you'll get things but I think that's really important is to keep an eye on that and there are a lot of complexity layers of complexities that go along with it and I'm sure that we're going to hear some of those also some of those will come out in terms of the programming and as Eric says with the with the donors and just just all those layers of complexity that hopefully that we can cut through to be able to provide really you know just a strong evidence base of what it is that we do and it's really important I liked it was interesting that Dr. Cha mentioned about the sport and terrorism and as I sat in Uganda this summer and of course when the World Cup final was going off and I was at the rugby field just a couple of days before that for a Uganda, Kenya rugby match and only to find out you know a couple of days later that it had been bombed by just the bombings that went off and a friend of mine said wow what a pity to use sport to disseminate terror and it just happened that it was known that it would be a very large gathering and one of my research assistants was there and thank goodness he and always kind of dead pan and somewhat jokingly said well I noticed when I had blood on me it wasn't mine so I kept moving and I was like okay I'm glad you can about it but that whole idea of disseminating terror through sport really hit home there for me as I was right at that field just a couple of days before for that match and to see that so I certainly would and I'm going to try and corral him before he goes to talk more about that but thank you all very much okay thank you I hope we've got some lively and engaged people here the the comment was that what do your students do at ten o'clock do they sit there and sit there without waking them up right now but if you those who are interested in making a comment asking a question if I could encourage you to move to the microphones I see our own David Smith is thank you this is yeah what I would don't wait for David to finish if you want to talk he's had the nearest microphone and get in the queue and I would like if you could identify yourself when you make your comment if you want to add questions are fine if someone wants to make a comment that's fine if someone wants to make a speech we may arrange for that to be done during the break no speech David Smith from USIP two comments one on the macro context and one of the micro context maybe it's a question Dr. Child was mentioning the risks and one of the things that I reminded myself of my own generation was really the boycott of the Olympics in 1980 by the United States as using sports as kind of high politics kind of operationally and the other is the recent Commonwealth games in India as being an example of the risk of putting yourself out there and India being shown for all of its works and not succeeding maybe the way China believes they succeeded thoughts on particularly the Commonwealth games and then looking at the micro and what Dean was saying is what you're speaking to is the risks and things gone bad in a sense of when this doesn't work and how it's important to not script it out maybe you can script it out but you know how do we avoid a sporting event you know we think about sporting events often we think about you know football games in Europe going you know going wild you know where it gets to be too much of a rivalry and then there's really blood beyond the field itself how do you avoid that from happening so kind of a two prong inquiry thanks do you want to those are two very interesting questions on the boycotts I mean it is the way sport was used during the Olympics and became more and more political and the irony was ultimately became so political that the final decision was not to play both in 1980 and then in 1984 and you know what I didn't refer to there is a body of literature that is strongly against the whole idea of sports and politics that really says what I call sort of the sports purist view where we should see sport only a sport and nothing else and of course a lot of people who believe that really start to come out after 1980 and 1984 the the so that's one point on the point about the Indian Commonwealth game absolutely I mean the flip side of nation building using sport for nation building is that sometimes it can go terribly wrong and in the Indian case it did in the Commonwealth games you saw all the flaws I mean quite frankly no offense to anyone here but the Atlanta games were also seen that way the Atlanta Olympics were not seen as the most terribly well organized games that's why often when countries host these Olympics they you know they put an incredible amount into the logistics of preparing for these games when you compare the Atlanta games with the Sydney games you know Australia has been very successful at taking sports and really projecting their image in the world on a broader you know really on a broader scale than they are in terms of power capabilities terms you know they're at best the middle power and yet they have used sporting events to really give themselves a broader space I mean everybody watches them everybody watches the Sydney games they think of Australia you know democracy a big player in the global war and terror overall image the one famous example I think of it going bad was Mugabe who wanted to use a regional sporting event as basically a spring board to be putting in a bid eventually to be the first African nation to host the Olympics and of course everything went wrong in terms of the preparation for this to the point where the loudspeaker system didn't work they gave the wrong date for the venue everything just everything went wrong and in that case you know obviously nation building you know the intention is nation building and creating and projecting a national identity that just goes horribly wrong thanks you know in the context which I'm working first of all it's very important to really try to put labels on these children and youth many of them are you know very you know just emerging from conflict and various roles in conflict and they're just very happy to be alive but have more stress over their futures than it is what they did in the past we have been very lucky to be able to you know to not really experience much if any violence outside of maybe just some immediate reactions what we were looking at were what we called the levels of conflict in sport and strategies for resolution and we looked at it really within the cultural context again like I said that strategies that work in one area may not work in another they may not be culturally relevant and when we looked at that we looked at just simple disagreements in sport all the way through you know that full blown retaliation and marking someone for harm and how do we go about that we haven't really experienced any of the latter as more opposed to the as more opposed to the former there just regular disputes that you can find on any playground I remember in Tanzania a group of people that were playing cricket spent more time arguing than they did actually playing and finally I gave them a rule book and told them to memorize it to avoid that arguing but you know again sport is very public and in many of the and through school they're participating in sport more so than they are in larger community events and things that you know that may spawn some of that I don't know hooliganism if you will or violent tendencies of even spectators and stuff let alone individuals participating but we've seen more or less just at that lower level of things where there's arguments and some physical reactions and stuff to sport and again we want to utilize these strategies and for them to be able to understand that that's not really an acceptable behavior but also connect it once again to outside of the of the football field or sport sporting events that's one of the things that I think is really important as I said before is that transfer and what good is it if it's done in sport but not transferred anywhere else and that's just containing it in that one paradigm and so we do want to adopt those strategies and have culturally relevant strategies that would be able to be able to prevent that but even a step before that is being able to prevent it from happening in the first place and but having being prepared to react to such incidences so I'm not sure if I answered the question there but try to in a roundabout way try to explain that okay thanks Ted? Ted Pfeiffer we've heard the panelists discuss various paradigms ways of looking at sports sports as a looking at sports and piecemaking from a macro or micro perspective sports as an essentially wholesome positive activity but which is something we have to look at and evaluate better to decide whether it's just a good activity or it's a useful activity but the more and more the panelists have discussed it it's also a activity which has a moral or a value free basis it's an activity you can look at it as activity without regard to having a positive or a negative value in of itself politically, culturally you could approach it as a tool and perhaps from an analytical perspective it can be looked at in that way as well and that can be just yet another paradigm for thinking about sports and piecebuilding or sports was that a okay someone want to take that one on well I'm not going to take it on too much but I would definitely agree I was talking about this not too long ago about being a very neutral and it is what you put into it and what you make of it and how you respond to how you respond to you know any incidences that may occur or again at that macro level I'll let Dr. Cha mention that talk about that but also I wanted to mention something about you know also we don't we tend to look a lot at team sport and maybe not so much at individual sport as well and we have to look at that idea and I mentioned that also because of looking at we found that a lot of individuals participated in athletics which technically is a team sport because you're helping out the team in terms of an overall score but it's an individual performance outside of relays excuse me that really is dependent upon that individual and the individual effort that's there as well so we need to be able to you know differentiate between that and look at all different aspects of sport not just we tend to be very team sports slanted I think and there's many values that are there that are intrinsic that we can bring to the table with utilizing sport in the team sense but also looking at other other forms of sport that may not be you know always so common okay I think Ted's comment is it's a very interesting one and I would I think as Dean said I think at the micro level that it is value free in that sense that people are on the field and they play the game for what it is in a broader social setting sports in many ways in our everyday lives is a it's a great social equalizer in the sense that I'm originally from New York City you take the train in the morning the day after the Yankees win and everybody's talking to each other in a way that they would never talk to each other or when the Giants won last night so the same sort of thing but I think at a macro level though at a macro level sports sports and the sort of mega sporting events do implicitly suggest and carry a value message in the sense that sports whether you're talking about the Olympics I mean it is about merit it is about the best performance should win with fair rules everybody plays on a level playing field fair rules transparent rules and then the best athlete wins and when you import some of those ideas and they're packaged in the form of Olympics or other mega sporting events and they're taking to illiberal societies it does create problems sometimes because and this is something the Olympic organizers and the IOC Charter readily acknowledges that sport in many ways reflects classical liberal liberalist values and that there is a link between sport and human rights and sport and human dignity sport and meritocracy and sport and equal opportunity and so I think in that sense at the macro level it does sometimes carry political values that it's ironic because some illiberal regimes like China in those sorts of instances they try to use a sports purist argument they say oh sport it's just about sport it's about nothing else and it should not have anything to say about our political values and our system so they sort of then flip the table and try to use a sports purism argument but I think at that macro level it does it does have those sorts of connotations you know the greatest example of this was the Nazi games where Hitler really tried to use these games to show the supremacy the yarring race and then this African-American man wins all of these gold medals and that was never intended to be political message but it clearly was the quintessential political message okay thanks over here you mentioned child soldiers in Uganda and sports as a vehicle for education and reintegration and then went on to state that the former abductees had exhibited more aggressive behavior than the former abductees the non-aductees and former abductees thank you my question then is you mentioned this is a cultural impact or possibly a cultural event cultural has significance in this did you see then over time how do you envision more of a coming together as the students and the abductees work together first of all we found that again it was through the quantitative data aspect of it and we're continuing to dig on it qualitatively to really understand that finding once again also we want to add more power to the thing that the individuals that were surveyed in that time and the former abductees that were surveyed last year that we add more power to it and see whether or not more former abductees we get a larger number of that first of all it compared to finding a correlation between non-abductees and former abductees in terms of peaceful and violent responses and we asked things like if somebody had harmed you in some way during sport by accident what would be an appropriate reaction and we brought it down to these particular facets of it like I just mentioned again we have to be very careful about that we have to look at things like length of abduction and the period of time in which they've been returned these were all individuals within their communities so some may have been in communities for several years and have really really have adapted to the rhythms of community life more so than somebody who has maybe just returned a few weeks ago so we have to take into consideration those things also really surprisingly people ask me all the time about the violence and it really wasn't there like I said there was more immediate reactions to things one boy I'll tell you very quickly one boy we were watching and they were playing and somebody had tackled him they were playing football and soccer excuse me I'm in the US and and he got tackled hard and when the boy got up who had tackled him to get the ball he pushed him down and I talked to him later and he said well professor I didn't push him down because I was a rebel I pushed him down and I thought that was really yeah yeah and then I watched Man U that night and I saw it happen five times so I said no and by no means is it acceptable but again those teachable moments and how do we react to those things are very important and the role of the coach and the facilitator of these programs is very very important and we also have to bear in mind how the conflict has affected them for instance if you have a child who is returned and that child had killed the parents of that coach or something you can imagine the animosity that may be there between those two and that coach may not or the facilitator of that program may not have the psychosocial readiness to be able to lead that program also but the violence was never at this large scale level or anything with full blown just some immediate reactions to things and when addressed we didn't see that many occurrences after that but sometimes I'll be at a natural reaction at times sure thanks I think what we'll try to do now is take a question from each side and then see how the respondents here can perhaps integrate their replies so if you could lead off thanks we seem to be shifting back and forth between Michael and Mike suggests that there's an interesting agenda behind the critiques of organizations that China was trying to and then the other side is when I was in Delhi in April talking to some Indian intellectuals who suggested that they were as critical as anybody about their preparation for the Commonwealth Games but they felt that the international critiques had real braces that anterior overtones and were quite concerned about that they felt that there was an agenda associated with that and certainly Greek people felt similar with about that of course in the end the Commonwealth Games came off everything was fine and talking to some athletes who had recently returned from the Games they said that the the athlete village which was subject to a great deal actually had set a new high bar for athletes which they could never be anymore pulled out and that way their only critique was that there was so much security that they didn't get to be much of Delhi we'll take one from each side Dr. Donnelly will introduce himself later in the day ma'am my name is Sarah Moran I'm a first year student a master's student in Georgetown they wake up early at Georgetown my question is actually looking at ways to integrate them where do you see sport as a tool economic development spoken a lot about political at the macro and a lot about social at the micro but is there a way to connect those two levels and where do you see that going forward good questions both of them on the critique and the preparations for the Games the interesting thing when I've looked at this is in terms of media coverage of these major events is that you do see a cycle and that is that in the run up to the events there are two things that are always focused on one is the logistics preparation and the other is the environmental impact or whether the environment is going to be clean because a lot of these games as we all know now happen in developing countries are actively bid for this because they see it as part of their economic development and things and so all the focus is on this and then the organizers particularly if they're from the third will inevitably see this as journalism with a whiff of racism and then once the games start whatever the games are the focus entirely shifts to the athletes of the games and I think that this was probably the case in Delhi it was certainly the case in Beijing and for this reason I think it was the case before the Los Angeles Games questions about logistics questions about smog before Barcelona questions about logistics questions about smog, soul it was the same so undeniably in advance of the games the fine glass is on how well people are being prepared and frankly nobody can meet the bar of being 100% prepared even the Chinese were under severe criticism in advance of the games but it is a cycle it's very much a cycle the interesting thing in the case of the Beijing Olympics was that there was all this focus on whether they would be well prepared and then questions about whether the air would be clean all of the attempts to by the Chinese to put down any efforts at using the games as a forum for political protests by different groups protesting Chinese policies in Tibet a policy to Africa these sorts of things and then the interesting thing was as you will all remember on the day of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics I was I was asked by the Lara news hour to go on and do commentary for the opening of the games and I got to the studio and they said this isn't the lead piece anymore this is the second piece the lead piece has to do with the war Russia's war basically and so in many ways the best thing that could happen for the Chinese was to start the games on the day that you had another major political event because the international news cycle no longer saw the Olympics as the hard news story they saw the Olympics as the soft news story and then all the focus went to the athletes while the hard news story was focused on the Russians and Chechnya so right so much for the Olympic truce on sport is a tool of economic development you know it's a good question Sarah I think the it's clear I mean it's clear in the history of this that as I said cities states even countries see the Olympics as an opportunity for some big ticket infrastructure, telecommunications other sorts of major projects that they wanted to do that they want to speed up and you saw this in Barcelona you saw it in Sydney you saw it in Utah and other places whether there is an empirical link between these games and sustained economic development is an entirely different question and I don't think there is really a lot of evidence to show that there's sustained economic development that comes out of these games you get this big surge usually having to do with a lot of public spending but then you see a drop-off often a post-olympic slump so I don't think we have well I don't know if it's been well researched but at least I don't think we've seen a real link there I think more and more you see as I said developing countries countries on the cusp that really want to use these games as an opportunity both to project a message to the world but also to spur some sort of economic development and again it's hard to say whether the latter the first of those is clearly something that we try to do some success or some not the latter it's not clear just real quick about the economic development piece and that is a great question I've always thought that this whole paradigm of sport for development and peace really did see the economic development piece under that auspices of development on that macro level but also one of the findings that we had in our research also was the development of what I called the economic development subscale that came out of the research a significant subscale and and what happened there is that the children and youth felt that they could learn workplace values through sport and they very much agreed that they could develop leadership skills through sport and workplace values and again those transference of those values and of course coupled with opportunity may be able to prove useful as well but one thing that they didn't really agree on was that sport could improve their employability and that was really interesting so we wanted to follow up on that piece as well and that but we've done some follow ups on that and we really do want to make that connection again if I mention a program I'm not endorsing the program but it's just for you to go out and look at it and find information on it and you make the judge of that but I was introduced to a program that's in I believe it's USAID funded program with Partners for America here in Washington DC and it's an economic development program through sport and they're scaling up now and they're in South America I believe in Peru Ecuador and Brazil as well and they look at that exactly you know what can we do to use sport to develop those workplace values and then they actually have partners within the within the cities or towns or whatever it is like a mentorship program and have children I'm sorry youth that are within this program then also have apprenticeships or internships along that lines and I found that interesting at that you know to touch on that micro level aspect of it as well Thanks Eric did you want to make a comment? The UN and especially our office really recognize the importance of mega sports events and I'm not an economist so I don't know how sustainable economic growth is after mega sports events but we also have to see that the direct revenues of these games are not kept by the host country it's the organizer the IOC and FIFA marketing TV rides, merchandising, ticketing and so on so we're trying to to really encourage those organizers and these organizations to invest in the legacy of the games and the IOC recently followed the example of FIFA FIFA had football for hope centers in 20 sites in Africa now the IOC is also kind of jumping on that train and has sports for peace centers so we work more with the international organizations and they invest for them at CSR corporate social responsibility but for us it's more about using the mega sports events as a communication platform of course to disseminate UN messages health education reproductive health, HIV AIDS and so on but also try to encourage the organizers who also have a commercial interest of course to invest more in social legacy programs and it's true I think it's an issue of the media in general this will not change negative reporting wherever games take place whether in developing countries or in developed countries so in South Africa everybody was surprised that the football World Cup was so perfectly organized there was no crime and the media went so far just two weeks before the games they reported about rats in the Johannesburg stadium just to write something because they lacked violent stories so I think it's this we cannot change the media and that's respect they have another agenda quite so we have approximately a minute and a half for three people to make their comments and our three panelists to make their responses I'm sensitive that we don't want to eat into the time for the second panel so if I could ask your indulgence please each of you standing there identify yourself make a brief comment or ask a brief question we'll see how rapidly we can this is going to be a sprint my name is Roger Foster I'm from the Center for Justice and Peace Building at Eastern Mennonite University the question that I have relates to macro and micro basically are those the only arenas available there's nothing in between on a continuum where people can participate at the MESA level as well thank you my name is Badge Healing I'm the managing director of the School of Justice my question is people who have thought the world of trauma we've talked about reconciliation and reintegration of child soldiers my question is is sports in this capacity a form of kinesthetic trauma healing and in fact what role does sports play in dealing with the trauma thank you my name is Kay Bogan I'm at American University my question actually goes really well I was wondering how can sport be used to reconcile divided societies so it's not quite at the macro level but somewhere in the middle of building a national identity for societies that are so divided by conflict okay thank you as well we do have exactly zero minutes for the three of you the questions referred to is there something MESA level in between the micro and the macro which we've talked about sports and healing of trauma and then reconciling divided societies and happy to have a turn at bat as long as you take no more than 45 seconds to make your swing I'll be very brief on the kinesthetic trauma healing question in the role of sport we need to be able to look at that we need to be able to examine I'd be so short to say that doing random control trials and that medical side of things but we have to understand that there's different exposures to violence obviously different traumas that come out of it so not every child is at similar levels not every child participated in violence or were victims of violence within conflict so we have to be able to see where they're at in that aspect I'll stop there and I'll talk to you later on the divided societies I think in terms of the question about micro versus macro I think looking through the rest of the schedule you have a lot in between there so I think that the rest of the day is going to really cover things quite well on the uniting divided societies just let me two quick examples I mean sport has been used to unite divided societies two very quick examples would be because they're contrasting ones the example of Yemen and Korea and in the case of Yemen you had the use of football soccer for north and south Yemen to create a united team and again the idea was when you had the unification of Yemen you had all these ministries that were being combined and all this other stuff for the people that means nothing when ministries it's like the port authority of New York and New Jersey merging like you can't but when the national football team merges that's a big deal everybody can see that and understand that and the way the Yemenis decide to do it was they did it they did it in a very they did it where they focused entirely on the unity of the country so they had players sort of from north and south north and south Yemen they had assistant coaches from north and south Yemen they played the so called the championship match on the one year anniversary of Yemeni unification and the head coach they could not pick north or south so they picked the Brazilian the converse case of that is the two Koreas which are still not they're still divided and they tried they fielded a united team to enter the Sydney Olympics together so they entered as one nation but they played separately then during the sunshine policy days the engagement policy days of the Kim Dae-jung administration they tried to form a united team the problem that they faced of course was that the South Koreans wanted best athletes on the united team and the North Koreans said no it's 50-50 quota right and you have South Korean world class athletes that said you know no I mean my teammate is the second best in the world and you're saying he can't be on the team because we have to put this North Korean on the team for equality reasons so it never happened right so those are two different cases of sport trying to unite divided societies thanks okay I appreciate the restraint here we're four minutes into overtime we'll have a break my colleague Kathleen is going to chair the next one on institutions and organizations mobilizing sports in peace building we've already talked a bit about that I'm going to take a chance on her ill will and say why don't you aim at being back here at 17 minutes after 11 on the dot is that right no I'm giving you too much how about 14 see what we can do and could I have one last round of applause for a very good panel please