Beyond Soccer

As the world's most popular game, soccer is unique in its ability to reflect and impact culture, society, and politics. Beyond Soccer: International Relations and Politics as Seen through the Beautiful Game provides students with a new and innovative way to learn about political science and international relations. It uses soccer players, officials, fans, and organizations to teach political science concepts-such as geopolitics, discourses, and sovereignty-and IR theories-including realism, liberalism, and feminism. This text also incorporates three common soccer discourses to highlight the possibilities of soccer as a tool for unity and social change, as a defender of established power, and as simultaneously a mechanism used by established power and an engine for social resistance.
With exercises, discussion questions, and keywords included in each chapter, Beyond Soccer is a worthwhile and accessible educational tool. Primarily written for undergraduate students of all levels, this book will be valuable in political science, international relations, cultural studies, and sociology courses.

Tamir Bar-On is a researcher and professor in the School of Social Sciences and Government, Tec de Monterrey. He is the author of Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (2007), Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (2013), and The World through Soccer: The Cultural Impact of a Global Sport (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Theory and International Relations Theories in Brief
Chapter 2: Realism, Liberalism, and Marxism
Chapter 3: Constructing Identities: Straddling the Local, National, and Global
Chapter 4: Learning about Postcolonialism through Soccer
Chapter 5: "You Just Don't Understand": A Feminist Reading of the "Beautiful Game"
Chapter 6: FIFA, Realism, and Emancipatory IR Theory
Chapter 7: Three Competing Soccer Discourses
Chapter 8: The Geopolitics of Soccer
Chapter 9: Soccer, Sovereignty, and the State of Exception
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author