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‘We’re all in this together’: Perspectives from within the Gulf Cooperation Council Women’s Games

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journal contribution
posted on 2021-04-09, 08:07 authored by Hussa Al-Khalifa, Dwa Al-Khalifa
Sport has often been advocated as a tool to achieve various social development (SD) goals. It has also been used as a way of expanding soft power (SP) influence. Combining both concepts provides an opportunity to understand how SP and SD may interrelate through the use of domestic SP strategies in sport. In this paper, we discuss the identified themes of unity, pride, and collective identity that arise from a regional women’s sporting competition in the Arabian Gulf among the Gulf Cooperation Council members, as factors that strengthened the prominence of athletes’ shared identity and connectedness. Using the perspectives of the authors who were immersed in the sporting competition, we argue that this information is important for sports organisers to use as bases for SP strategies to achieve inwards-focused social goals.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Volume

57

Issue

2

Pages

201-216

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Publication date

2021-03-12

Copyright date

2021

ISSN

1012-6902

eISSN

1461-7218

Language

  • en

Depositor

Deposit date: 8 April 2021