I have a small secret. I'm not a believer. I don't subscribe to the view that 'Sport has the power to change the world'. Or, more accurately, I don't believe that sport can be used for peace, development or reconciliation without, at the very least, a wider understanding of how it does, and how it might not.
Take football. A marvellous game, watched and participated in with enthusiasm the world over. A game that can bring communities together. Or a game that can cement division as fans take to the streets to show their antipathy to the opposition. A game of pure simplicity, yet a game so often dominated and influenced by local politics and clouded by murkiness.
This blog is a chance for me to write about events that happen in the sports world which are examples of how sport can affect peace and reconciliation. Hopefully there will be plenty shining positive examples of how sport can change the world, I so very much want to be a believer. But, for now, I concur with the view of a man tasked with the development of football for peace programmes in Bosnia who asks 'how can an aim as pure and true as peace and reconciliation be achieved by an activity that is so rotten at its heart?'
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