Introduction

The focus of this handbook is ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ (SDP). SDP may be defined as a broad social field in which sport and related activities are used to pursue different types of non-sporting development and peacebuilding goals across the world (see Kidd 2008; Levermore 2008; Darnell 2012). These development goals are varied and centre, for example, on poverty reduction, education and training, conflict resolution, the empowering of women, the social inclusion of minorities, health promotion, and reducing urban crime and violence. SDP is also known by other titles, such as ‘Sport for Development’ (SFD), ‘Sport for Change’ and ‘Sport for Good’. We also view SDP as encompassing other fields which use sport for development purposes, such as ‘positive youth development’ (PYD) in North America and ‘sports-based interventions’ in the UK (Kelly 2011; Holt 2016). As it is the best known of all these titles for such activities, we have elected to use SDP to capture the broad focus of this handbook.