Discussion | Sports and Diplomacy Roundtable

This roundtable will introduce the audience to sports diplomacy and how it can be used both through governments (states, United Nations) as well as informally through citizen-to-citizen exchanges. It will reflect on key lessons learned and best practices, as well as what leadership within the sports diplomacy framework can look like.

In August 2023, basketball became the first sport ever to formally receive its own dedicated international day by the United Nations when World Basketball Day was announced. To be celebrated every December 21st, the day in 1891 of the game’s first match, the initiative reflects basketball’s new worldwide stature, one primed for a 21st century takeover and key tool in sports diplomacy and international affairs.

That’s because this global game is now powering international affairs, policy, and sporting dynamics, from Africa and the Gulf States to the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific: as the NBA heads for its second annual preseason match in Abu Dhabi this October; as Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund is now a 5% owner of Monumental Sports (parent company of the NBA’s Washington Wizards and WNBA’s Washington Mystics); as NBA’s Basketball Africa League prepares for its fourth season in Senegal, Egypt, and Rwanda and is centered around basketball diplomacy within Africa as well as externally to the globe; as WNBA players try to figure out how to earn livelihoods without always playing the off-season overseas (witness the decline in those playing in Russia after the Brittney Griner case). And as the NBA’s new highly anticipated 19-year-old star, French unicorn Victor Wembanyma, prepares to make his league debut with the legendary San Antonio Spurs.

This roundtable will introduce the audience to sports diplomacy and how it can be used both through governments (states, United Nations) as well as informally through citizen-to-citizen exchanges. It will reflect on key lessons learned and best practices, as well as what leadership within the sports diplomacy framework can look like.

Featuring:

David Hollander, Author, How Basketball Can Save the World; Assistant Dean of Real World and Clinical Professor with the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, NYU SPS

Lindsay Krasnoff, Adjunct Instructor, historian, writer, speaker, and consultant working at the intersection of global sport, communication, and diplomacy.

Pops Mensah-Bonsu, former NCAA, NBA & Olympic Team GB player, current President of the Westchester Knicks’ G-League Operations, founder of SEED Project Ghana, and one of the NBA Basketball Africa League’s Ambassadors.

Waheguru Pal Singh (W.P.S.) Sidhu, Clinical Professor and directs the United Nations (UN) Specialization at the Center for Global Affairs, NYU SPS