LSC Lecture Series | Dario Brentin (Graz) Breaking/Making the Nation? Sport and the construction of identities 

This talk is part of the LSC Lecture Series on Sport, Politics, Conflict, which is organized by the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World. The talks are open to all staff at UR and IOS, as well as the general public. UR students can sign up for the course and receive credits.

Lecture hall H5 is in the lower Central Lecture Theatre Building (Zentrales Hörsaalgebäude - ZH) located near the Audimax. UR Campus-Plan 

Abstract | The presentation aims to explore the ambivalent role of representative sport in the production and articulation of national identities. Drawing on insights from Nationalism Studies, it interrogates the extent to which national and representative sport can function as a meaningful site of collective identification while questioning how much political significance is ultimately inscribed into these spectacles. Focusing on Southeast Europe, the discussion traces the shifting symbolic uses of sport from late socialist Yugoslavia to contemporary Kosovo. Moments of international competition have frequently been framed as condensed performances of nationhood, offering powerful narratives of unity, recognition, and belonging. Yet such interpretations risk overstating sport’s capacity to produce durable national cohesion or influence political realities. By examining both celebratory and contentious sporting moments in the region, the talk highlights how representative sport operates as a highly visible arena for projecting national meaning while remaining largely incapable of shaping Realpolitik outcomes. Sport, therefore, reveals both the imaginative power and the structural limits of national symbolism.

Dario Brentin is a PhD candidate at the University of Graz working on the interrelation of sport and national identity in post-Yugoslav Croatia. He has published extensively on the nexus of sport and politics in the post-Yugoslav space both in academic publications and in the press.