Putting the P in SDP: Sport and Peace-Building in Divided Societies: The Origins and Evolution of Critical Proactivism

This chapter is a personal recollection of the early days of my career and the ways in which those localised efforts led to larger things within Sport for Development and Peace.1 A notorious sectarian episode spurred me to get involved with hands-on cross-community sport and conflict resolution work in Northern Ireland. Although I did not realise it at the time, that violence was one of two events that stimulated and helped to launch what was to become a pioneering voyage of discovery through the largely unchartered waters of sport for development in an endeavour to find and/or invent ways of using sport in the service of conflict resolution and peace-building: first in Northern Ireland; and subsequently in other divided, ethno-religiously distressed and socio-