RERIS Studies in International Sport Relations
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In collaboration with:
Georgia Cervin
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Edited by:
Philippe Vonnard
The RERIS Studies in International Sport Relations series publishes books that explore interconnectivity between international-level actors (people, organizations, and/or states), as well as transnational and global histories of sport. An important focus is on international sport organizations and their leaders, a topic that still remains - with the exception, perhaps, of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) - underexplored in much of the existing scholarship. The series also gives special attention to work that helps address continuing diversity issues in both the scholarship and the field more broadly.
RERIS (Réseau d’études des relations internationales sportives) was created in 2015 to provide a platform for the increasing scholarly interest in questions around the place of sport and physical education in international relations in the twentieth century to the present. The network holds annual events and regular webinars.
We strongly encourage work about and submissions from underrepresented groups, including but not limited to women, people of color, and the Global South. Research and studies in sport history by young scholars and in other languages has also increased in recent years. Another goal of this series is thus to publish books stemming from PhD theses, including translations of those not originally written in English.
All manuscripts will be peer-reviewed by members of the advisory board, scientific committee, or external experts. Interested authors are encouraged to submit a short proposal in English to the publisher (Julia.Brauch@degruyter.com) or to Philippe Vonnard (philippe.vonnard@unil.ch) and Amanda Shuman (amanda.shuman@gmail.com).
Editors
Philippe Vonnard, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
Amanda Shuman, Universität Freiburg, Germany
Advisory Board
Georgia Cervin, The University of Western Australia
Sylvain Dufraisse, University of Nantes, France
Brenda Elsey, Hofstra University, New York, USA
Nicola Sbetti, University of Bologna, Italy
Scientific Committee
Axel Elias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Daphné Bolz, University of Rouen, France
Y. Andrew Hao, University of Minnesota, Morris, USA
Tarminder Kaur, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
George Kioussis, California State University, Northridge, USA
Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, New York University, USA
Jörg Krieger, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Juliane Lanz, University of Rostock, Germany
Livia Goncalves Magalhaes, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Claire Nicolas, SOAS - London, UK
Grégory Quin, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Juan Antonio Simón Sanjurjo, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
Topics
What role has football (and sport in general) played in Hungarian foreign policy? Was there a continuity between the inter-war period and communism? Are foreign politics and sporting diplomacy synonyms? This book tries to provide answers to these questions through a careful examination of documents of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry and Hungarian newspapers, supplemented by documentation from several European countries. Through Hungarian football, the author traces a history of Hungary during the Age of Extremes with a special focus on the period during which sport played a particular role in Hungarian foreign policy: from 1924, the date of the Paris Olympics, the first time the country competed after World War I, to 1960, date of the Olympics of Rome. The result is a study from a particularly original perspective, highlighting, first and foremost, the transnational dimension of Hungarian football.
Winner of the Susan Glantz Book Prize of the Hungarian Studies Association
Football and Fascism. The Politics of Popular Culture in Portugal tells the hidden history of football and discusses its political, social and cultural foundations, during the longest running authoritarian regime in Europe. Theoretically grounded on Bourdieu’s field theory, and using a multi-scalar methodology, this award-winning research explores the political tensions between the nationalization of sports envisaged by the Portuguese “New State” and the integration of national football in a globalized urban popular culture. Mobilizing unexplored archival sources, and a wide array of primary materials, this groundbreaking work offers new insight on the administrative structures of the corporativist state, the making of an authoritarian cultural program, and the relation between state institutions and civil society. Besides broadening the scope of existing transnational histories of football, this study also puts into question the conventional geographies and political chronologies adopted in sports history.
For his oustanding research, Rahul Kumar won the 2015 “Mário Soares Award - EDP Foundation” for best work in Portuguese history by researchers under 35 and received an honourable mention, also in 2015, in the “CES Award for Young Portuguese speaking Social Scientists”, attributed by the Centre for Social Studies of Coimbra University.
In 1974, the Brazilian sports official João Havelange was elected FIFA’s president in a two-round election, defeating the incumbent Stanley Rous. The story told by Havelange himself describes a private odyssey in which the protagonist crisscrosses two thirds of the world canvassing for votes and challenging the institutional status quo. For many scholars, Havelange’s triumph changed FIFA’s (International Federation of Football Association) identity, gradually turning it into a global and immensely wealthy institution. Conversely, the election can be analyzed as a historical event. It can be thought of as a political window by means of which the international dynamic of a specific moment in the Cold War can be perceived. In this regard, this book seeks to understand which actors were involved in the election, how the networks were shaped, and which political agents were directly engaged in the campaign.
