#TeamRefugee could be the most important thing to happen at the Rio Olympics | 2016

Amid the economic turmoil and security concerns plaguing Brazil as it prepares for the Rio 2016 Olympics, a new precedent is quietly being set.  For the first time in history, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has designated a team of Refugee Olympic Athletes, which according to the IOC, “will be treated at the Olympic Games like all the other teams of the 206 National Olympic Committees.”  IOC president Thomas Bach describes the process:

“Having no national team to belong to, having no flag to march behind, having no national anthem to be played, these refugee athletes will be welcomed to the Olympic Games with the Olympic flag and with the Olympic Anthem. They will have a home together with all the other 11,000 athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees in the Olympic village.”

They are the only team that is not formed based on the idea of nation-states. This is symbolic not only of the scale of displacement globally, but also as a hugely public acknowledgement of the changing norms within the global system of nation-states. This is huge.

What’s the big deal? This might just seem like a smart move to drive awareness about displacement. On the surface, it is. It’s  a very pointed political statement by one of the most visible international organizations about the massive scale of displacement globally. How massive? Current estimates put the world population of displaced people at 65.3 million, roughly the same population as France. This is the highest level of displacement on record, and more than 20.2 million of those displaced are designated as refugees, fleeing from persecution and violence. Horror stories of refugee boats capsizing in attempted escapes from conflict zones have become a near-daily occurrence, and the question of which countries will take in refugees has become one of the most contentious issues in global politics.

Team Refugee has emerged as a way to include and acknowledge these displaced people on one of the world’s biggest stages. For scale, in 2012, theLondon Olympics was the most-watched event in TV history. Like ever. This year Team Refugee will be covered by the media, just like all 206 national teams, and their personal stories of the refugee experience will be broadcast to a huge worldwide audience. To have refugees competing, and announcers referring to members as being from Team Refugee over and over for two weeks, at one of the most heavily reported events of the year–this will be hard to ignore. This has the potential to be a big win in bringing awareness ofstatelessness to a new audience, in a new context.

But there’s more. This acknowledgement by the IOC is symbolic of changing norms in the conception of nation states. What are nation-states? The modernnation-state, what we generally perceive of as an area where the cultural boundaries match up with the political boundaries, is a development of the 19th century. It is the idea that nations should be represented within a territorially defined state, and that they have sovereignty.  Scholars, particularly of globalization, have been questioning for some time whether globalization will incite the end of the nation-state, and generally they agree that it is likely to change the nation state to some degree.  This is not a common concept among the general public, for whom it generally goes without question that, for example,  “America” resides physically within the borders of “America.”  But what happens when people of a nation state are displaced from its territory? What happens to the nationality of a people when a nation-state falls apart? How do you reconcile that massive reality (again, 65 million people) with a system built on the concept of the nation-state?

That’s where Team Refugee comes in: the sheer number of refugees and displaced people make these questions more relevant than ever. Team Refugee (athletes by definition without a territory) will compete alongside territorial nation states in a competition that is fundamentally based on the concept of nationhood. The existence of this team is an exception to theOlympic charter that says that “any competitor in the Olympic Games must be a national of the country of the NOC which is entering such competitor.” The creation of this team by the IOC is an acknowledgement that the nation-state is not the only player in these Olympic games, and by extension, the world of geopolitics.

The refugees on this team don’t fit within the current system–something new had to be created by the international organization that runs the Olympics. This is an acknowledgement that there are huge populations for whom the nation-state doesn’t serve the same function as it once did, and recognizes the necessity of an alternative. These are all concepts that have been studied for years by scholars of politics and globalization, but for the first time they will be broadcast in the context of sports, to an enormous and worldwide general audience.  This is an indicator of the changing norms of acceptance of non-state entities, at least at the Olympics. It is an opportunity for a different kind of conversation about refugees to emerge and become more widespread–a conversation that will continue to gain significance as greater numbers of people are displaced by conflict and environmental changes.