Tourism Geopolitics

Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination

Edited by Mary Mostafanezhad, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, and Roger Norum

The University of Arizona Press

By the start of the century, nearly one billion international travelers were circulating the globe annually, placing tourism among the worlds’ most ubiquitous geopolitical encounters. While the COVID-19 pandemic brought the industry to a sudden halt, its geopolitical significance remained. With striking clarity, tourism desires and reinvented mobilities revealed the impermanence of Old World orders as new global alliances were forged. While scholars have critically examined tourism in the contexts of development, cultural change, and environmental crisis, much less attention has been paid to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of the world’s largest industry. This collection homes in on tourism and its geopolitical entanglements by examining its contemporary affects, imaginaries, and infrastructures. It develops the concept of tourism geopolitics to reveal the growing centrality of tourism in geopolitical life, as well as the geopolitical nature of the tourism encounter.

In Tourism Geopolitics, contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectonical evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Collectively, the chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practices, as well as the geopolitical nature of everyday tourism encounters. This volume is a vital read for critical geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of tourism and cultural studies.

Contributors: Sarah Becklake, M. Bianet Castellanos, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Jason Dittmer, Klaus Dodds, Jamie Gillen, Simon Halink, Jordan Hallbauer, James Igoe, Debbie Lisle, Mary Mostafanezhad, Dieter K. Müller, Roger Norum, Alessandro Rippa, Ian Rowen, Robert Saunders, Juan Francisco Salazar, Tani Sebro, Mimi Sheller, Henrk Szadziewski, Vernadette Vicuña González, Emma Waterton

Editors

Mary Mostafanezhad is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her work is broadly focused on tourism, development, and socioenvironmental change in Southeast Asia.

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is an assistant professor in the Communication Department at University of California, San Diego. Her most recent book is Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power and Labor in Contemporary Yucatán.

Roger Norum is a university lecturer in cultural anthropology at the University of Oulu, Finland. His work explores comparative and theoretical dimensions of mobility, sociality, and the environment, often through the lens of shifting media practices.

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