Bound to the nation: Pacific Islands rugby and the IRB’s new ‘one-country-for-life’ eligibility rules

Introduction: sport globalization and the nation Globalization as a process has become the defining condition of modern society. Although not a new phenomenon, globalization has reached unprecedented levels in the present epoch. This increasing interdependence of national contexts and levels of supraterritoriality has been facilitated by the increasing scale and efficiency of communications technologies, both physical and virtual. However, as Sassen discusses, ‘The global does not (yet) fully encompass the lived experience of actors or the domain of institutional orders and cultural formations; it persists as a partial condition’1 where nation states still come to play an impactful role.2