Tag: geopolitics of sport

In July 2025, Orkney hosted 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 on Isle of Man. 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 independent nations. 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.

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. These are places which sit at peripheries of national and international governance – and often supranational imagination. The neglect within media of th Games is reflected by academic literature: sport, politics, and the histories of sport in these places are rarely discussed.