A contemporary perspective on the traditional gap between ‘clean minds’ and ‘dirty hands’ in the sport and refugee movement

Sport for Development (SfD) literature tends to focus on and value bottom-up, grassroots projects and realities, and criticize top-down (i.e., from high- to low-authority) approaches. This is also true when considering the intersection of sport and refugees. With millions of people displaced every year, a new perspective is needed to reconcile bottom-up and top-down approaches. In this conceptual paper, we provide literature that frames traditional and contemporary issues embedded in the refugee and sport domains with a specific focus on the top-down, bottom-up approaches SfD stakeholders adopt. From these stakeholder configurations, associated challenges, and complexities, we present a contemporary effort to challenge the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ dichotomy; namely, by drawing parallels to the concept of clean minds (top) and dirty hands (bottom). We interrogate this discrepancy in two ways: first, through our experiences and interpretations as members of the Olympic Refuge Foundation’s Think Tank; second, by merging the “clean minds, dirty hands” concept with Lefebvre’s (1991) theory of social space. Ultimately, the clean minds, dirty hands dichotomy is better represented as a spectrum that interacts with Lefebvre’s theory in unique ways. Implications for influencing the sport and refugee movement, as well as the broader field of SfD, are discussed.