Lars Rensmann

Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global--and globalizing--sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

Die Studie hat das Ziel, die qualitative politische Kulturforschung zum Problem des Antisemitismus und zu politischen Mobilisierungschancen von Judenfeindlichkeit in der demokratischen Gesellschaft neu zu fundieren. Vor dem Hintergrund multifaktorieller Modelle werden Parameter und Deutungsmuster entworfen, mit denen die politischen und diskursiven Gelegenheitsstrukturen antisemitischer Mobilisierungsversuche und 'Judenbilder' in der bundesrepublikanischen Demokratie empirisch erforscht werden. Die Untersuchung des Antisemitismus als ideologischem und politisch-psychologischem Bindemittel in der extremen Rechten wie in der radikalen Linken sowie die Analyse offentlich-politischer Diskursprozesse der letzten Jahre zeigen, dass sich das politisch-kulturelle Bedingungsgefuge im Zeitalter rapider Modernisierung und Globalisierung verandert und sich die politische Opportunitat antisemitischer Vorurteile erhoht hat.