A Sociocultural Analysis of Korean Sport for International Development Initiatives

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the following questions: 1) What is the structure of the Korean sport for international development discourse? 2) How are the historical transformations of particular rules of formation manifested in the discourse of Korean sport for international development? 3) What knowledge, ideas, and strategies make up Korean sport for international development? And 4) what are the ways in which these components interact with the institutional aspirations of the Korean government, directed by the official development assistance goals, the foreign policy and diplomatic agenda, and domestic politics? To address these research questions, I focus my analysis on the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and its 30 years of expertise in designing and implementing sport and physical activity–related programs and aid projects. For this research project, I collected eight different sets of KOICA documents published from 1991 to 2017 as primary sources and two different sets of supplementary documents including government policy documents and newspaper articles. By using Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy as methodological frameworks, the analysis highlights how KOICA sport has functioned for three decades as 1) an international development tool, 2) a diplomacy tool, and 3) a domestic policy tool of the Korean state. The conclusion focuses on 1) the relevance of findings to the larger context of SFD, sport diplomacy, and domestic policy and political literature; 2) additional cases demonstrating the ways other nations might employ sport for political purposes, in comparison with KOICA sport; 3) KOICA sport’s potential future as an alternative to Korean SFD and future direction of my research journey toward a big picture of East Asian SFD.