Former BSSH Chair and highly respected member of the society, Dr Matthew McDowell of the University of Edinburgh is proposing a special issue of Sport in History to potentially be released in 2026. The special issue in question, with the provisional title: “Sport, “islands”, people, and politics”, is based on the conference of the same name, which was held in Kirkwall, Orkney, Scotland on the 28th of June 2025.
To provide some contextual background: In July 2025, Orkney will host the XX Island Games. The sporting competition is held every two years in a variety of polities on the Atlantic Rim; their first iteration was in 1985, part of a much wider programme of tourism development during the Isle of Man’s Year of Sport.
The 40-year history of the Island Games and the International Island Games Association (IIGA) has featured a variety of non-sovereign polities, territories, dependencies, autonomous regions, council areas, and even formerly (in the case of Iceland and Malta) independent nations. In the Scottish context (and elsewhere), they additionally feature “stateless nations” participating in sport under their own flags. These are places which sit at peripheries of national and international governance – and often supranational imagination. This neglect within media and broader popular culture is reflected by academic literature: sport, politics, and the histories of sport in these places are rarely discussed, and are often treated as novel and anomalous. On the contrary, the Island Games, and indeed sport in the Atlantic Rim’s peripheries, are crucial towards understanding a variety of historical and contemporary phenomena which have relevance far beyond the playing field.
This issue seeks to centre sport in the member “islands” and territories of the IIGA (International Island Games Association)*. Potential topics for papers include (but are not limited to):
- Histories of sport, collective and individual, in Island Games territories
- Folk and traditional sport in Island Games territories
- How sport reflects shifting politics and culture in non-sovereign/devolved territories
- Sport policy in Island Games territories, as well as regional sport policy/politics
- Island Games territories and the broader geopolitics of sport
- Diplomacies of (small-)island sport
- (Post)colonial politics, relationships, and dilemmas in sport in Island Games territories
- Sport and performances of national identity/everyday nationalism
- Histories of the Island Games competition
- Island Games territories and Olympic/FIFA recognition
- The offshore, fisheries, and petroleum economies of sport in Island Games territories
- Sport and emerging security challenges in the Baltic and Mediterranean regions
If you are interested in submitting a paper, please submit a proposal as a 300-word abstract to Matt McDowell (matthew.mcdowell@ed.ac.uk) by 8 August 2025. After acceptance of your abstract, Dr McDowell will then discuss with editor-in-chief Dr Rob Lake a formal proposal and a timetable for submission of draft articles, peer review, and publication.
