ABSTRACT
Before the hybrid term sports diplomacy can be conceptualised, its individual parts must be correctly, and thoroughly, understood. To facilitate, this chapter employs interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, culture and sociology in order to establish the ‘essence’ of diplomacy (Jönsson and Hall 2005). At times, the reader may find this exercise pedantic, however, the concept of diplomacy is often misunderstood. For Sharp (2003, 857), it is a ‘notoriously tricky term … conveying many and different things’, and, Sir Harold Nicolson (1957, 3), one of the great diplomatic practitioner-theorists, agrees, writing that it is a ‘precise, although wide’ term.
