Politics and Tourism

Many commentators on tourism and travel have registered the belief that there is scarcely any subject as inherently political as tourism. Increasingly, tourism is found to be a principal defining industry that inscribes and thereby makes places and spaces. Since it fundamentally deals with the promotion and development of local sites and sights and with the harnessing of local, regional, and national inheritances, tourism is inevitably a conflictual phenomenon at each of those levels. Indeed, tourism is a juggernaut through which old and corrective visions of tribal or private self-identity are not only declared but produced and consumed. This entry explores the deep connectivities between tourism and politics. It first examines the nature of politics, then further develops the notion that tourism is inherently a ...