It will soon be 95 years since the Christmas Day truce, when British and German troops left their trenches on the Western Front for improvised games of soccer in No Man’s Land. They exchanged gifts of whiskey, jam, cigars and chocolate. They buried their dead. They kicked around a makeshift ball of straw tied into a bundle. And then the slaughter resumed.

Can sports ever make a more lasting contribution to peace in the world?

The notion that it can — because across all our divisions of race, religion or creed we play to the rules of the game — brought together 440 delegates from 85 countries and with 47 governments represented at the third international forum for Peace and Sport in Monte Carlo, at which I spoke, last month.

The forum, founded by Joël Bouzou, a former French Olympic pentathlete, is a meeting of minds, a well of good intentions. It brings together Afghans and Pakistanis, Israelis and Palestinians, sports stars and people fighting not only conflicts but the war on poverty and diseases across Africa and Latin America.

Bouzou’s organization leads projects in Burundi, Ivory Coast, East Timor and other places where orphans from both sides of recent wars, play soccer and other games. Some lack the basic requirements ever to dream of sport taking them out of their poverty, because they have had limbs blown off. They play nevertheless, and once they compete, their suspicion of one another erodes.

So sport, not war, is not simply a dreamer’s ideology.

If you have seen, as I have, the joy of soccer played in transit camps of Sierra Leone soon after the civil war, two things are strikingly apparent. Once they play, and play hard on the same patch of ground, they see the other side of those they were indoctrinated to hate. The second striking thing is that so many of them either wear the replica shirts of favorite stars, or call out their names as they compete.

Sometimes, those stars even care, even do something with their global fame. Four days before Christmas, tickets will go on sale for a match in which Zinédine Zidane and Ronaldo will represent the United Nations Development Program against a side from Benfica next month.

The game, in Lisbon’s Stadium of Light on January 25, will mark the seventh straight year that Zidane and Ronaldo, two accomplished World Cup winners, have played “The Match Against Poverty.” Zidane is now retired, Ronaldo still holds out remote hope of Brazil calling him to his fourth World Cup.

The proceeds of their annual game, close to $1 million a time, go toward reducing child poverty and fighting H.I.V./AIDS. Ronaldo, now 33 and the father of a Christmas Day child, is still scoring goals for Corinthians of São Paulo. And some still regard him as a child in the body of a man, rescued from the streets through his game.

If the games he and Zidane organize and play in once a year seem far from the dangers of war, there are plenty of remarkable people who get up close.

Anders Levinsen is a former Danish soccer professional who takes his sport, through a nongovernmental organization he calls “Cross Cultures,” into areas of recent conflict.

He leads 10,000 volunteer coaches, 40,000 coordinators, into no-go areas where hatred lingers after the bombs and the bullets. His coaches tread where the U.N. peacekeeping troops meet suspicion.

“They are afraid of the blue helmets.” Levinsen said. “But what sports can do is activate the child on the ground.

“Something happens when we play football together. It takes time in Lebanon, Iraq, Ivory Coast or Macedonia, but sooner or later, you find a secure environment — no flags, not even the insignia of sponsors. You need the kids to know you are not with the military, though you need military leaders to allow it. Then the game breaks down barriers, in some cases come from people of more than two ethnic differences.”

Soccer is not the only sport on the front lines. Men are not alone in trying to make peace.

Dr. Sarah Fane was not heralded at the forum, but her story is no less remarkable than those who were. She is a doctor of medicine, a mother of four from a quiet English village who took a tour of duty in Afghanistan and could not walk away from the deaths through curable diseases and the lack of schooling there.

Fane started her own charity, “Afghan Connection,” to build schools amid rural ruin. She partly funds those through cricket.

The game appeals to Afghans, and the doctor persuaded the Marylebone Cricket Club, which used to run English cricket, to fund coaching for boys who might become Afghanistan’s national team.

The doctor’s example is that Britain does not just send troops to die in Afghanistan. And hers is not the only sport-backed initiative.

Just when you wonder if there is any self-help among the people in devastated places, Kuki Gallmann shows that there is. She is an Italian writer who has lived in the highlands of Kenya since 1972 — and when the unrest among the tribes occupying the Rift Valley turned into ethnic killings in 2008, Gallmann acted.

She recruited local men, women and children to clear a space. One day they lifted rocks, the next they had to do it all over again after elephants trampled their ground.

Finally, her dream of a Highlands Games in Laikipia brought together 1,200 athletes in a variety of sports. “Once people play, once they look in the eyes of other people, they see they are the same.” she said in Monte Carlo, “Sport works.”

It is a far stretch from the Rift Valley to Monte Carlo, the tax haven of the ultrarich. But Bouzou and his backer Prince Albert II, another Olympian, believe peace is sustainable so long as the will to play is painstakingly kept up.

The firing does not necessarily have to restart after Christmas.

Note: This story was originally reported at the New York Times

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