Category: Sports as Statecraft
-
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Show and Empire’s New Strategy
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show wasn’t revolutionary or un-American. It showed how U.S. power absorbs difference without conceding autonomy.
published:
·
-
The IOC Banned South Africa. Then It Quoted Mandela.
Mandela Olympic opening ceremony: the IOC excluded South Africa for 28 years over apartheid, then used Mandela’s words as ceremonial peace language.
published:
·
-
Sports as Infrastructure: How Games Power Capital and State
How modern sports bind emotion, media, infrastructure, and nationalism into a single system that monetizes loyalty while shaping politics and power
published:
·
-
Why Canadians Won’t Show Up at World Juniors in Minnesota
Border friction, political unease, and rising costs kept Canadians home. The half-empty arena showed how travel politics now shape hockey crowds.
published:
·
-
Fighting in the Age of Collapse
As institutions fail and collapse becomes constant, the UFC thrives as pure spectacle; yet every movement in the cage still carries older histories of resistance.
published:
·
-
Deni Avdija’s Zionism Shows It’s Not Just About Basketball
The public backlash towards Israeli NBA player Deni Avdija isn’t about his ethnicity or his birthplace — it’s about his public role in Zionism’s soft-power strategy in the broader context of colonial occupation, state violence, and an ongoing genocide.
published:
·
-
Winnipeg Hosts Grey Cup on 140th Anniversary of Riel’s Execution
On the day Canada marked 140 years since Louis Riel’s hanging, the Grey Cup celebrated Indigenous visibility, revealing the deep contradictions of the settler state.
published:
·
-
How the Grey Cup Became Canada’s National Ritual
From wartime morale to reconciliation politics, the Grey Cup has served as a national ritual shaping Canadian identity when politics struggles to hold the country together.
published:
·
-
Ron MacLean Repeats Columbus Myth on Hockey Night
Ron MacLean’s Columbus remark repeats a colonial myth disproven by UNESCO, historians, and the TRC, revealing how national media still distort Indigenous history.
published:
·
-
Baseball as Power: Emotion, Ritual, and State Control
Baseball isn’t just a game—it’s a system of emotional management, civic identity, and state power that shapes how cities gather, feel, and understand themselves.
published:
·
-
Toronto Baseball and the City’s Ritual of Power and Emotion
How the 2025 Blue Jays run exposed Toronto’s emotional life, state power, colonial narratives, and the machinery that turns sports into civic governance.
published:
·