The Stateless Kings: How Chess preserves an ideal in a fractured world

FIDE’s official motto, Gens una sumus (we are one family), was adopted in 1952, almost three decades after the chess governing body was set up in 1924. On its face, the motto carries the naïve idealism of a mid-twentieth-century world recovering from the horrors of the Second World War.A hopeful attempt to frame a centuries-old game of simulated warfare as an instrument of global peace. Across more than seven decades of geopolitical upheavals, ideological iron curtains and border-redefining wars since 1952, chess has been forced to answer a recurring question: what happens to a family when its member nations tear each other apart?Global sport has followed a very predictable response to geopolitical conflicts. Athletes are routinely cancelled; lifelong pursuits of their craft are cut short by state actions they had no role in.FIDE, chess’s governing body, has let its motto guide its response to such moments.