Research Seminar Series - Adam Ali

“We will make refugees proud around the world, and we will make them smile”: Necropolitics, post-colonialism, and the rise of the Olympic Refugee Team

In 2015, during the height of the so-called European migration crisis, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) created the Refugee Olympic Team. Over the last decade, the Team’s participation within the Olympic movement has occurred during an era of intensified hostility towards immigrants, refugees, and migrants within the Western world, including the United Kingdom, Western Europe, the United States, and Canada. This paper utilizes Edward Said’s critiques of Orientalism and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to trace mediated representations of the IOC Refugee Team through analyses of IOC press releases and news media stories. I argue that the Refugee Olympic Team athletes are represented through “resiliency stories” that construct them as exceptional development subjects who traverse from “unfortunate” geographies in search of the “good life” through sport. Such stories concomitantly position Western sport institutions such as the IOC as the necessary development agents through which the “good life” can be realized. At the same time, I illuminate the ways in which this posited “good life” is tenuous, unstable, and contingent on these athletes’ conformity to these institutional structures. This results in the production of what I call “necro-athletes” whose political status is contingent on their athletic prowess, disaggregation from Othered subjectivities, including that of their homeland’s cultures, practices, and histories, and their simplified construction as “symbols of hope” within Olympic discourses.

History’s Research Seminar Series offers the Western and London communities the chance to hear historical researchers of all sorts – academic and public historians from our own department and from across North America – present the findings of their research. Everyone is welcome to attend.

For more information on the Research Seminar Series, please visit https://history.uwo.ca/about_us/events/research_seminar_series.html