A critical review of dark tourism studies

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The topic of dark tourism emerged in the last three decades as tourism became more accessible. It allows forgotten history to be revised and transferred to the public. This study aims to restructure existing categorization regarding dark tourism and address the research gaps in dark tourism studies. We collected studies from international publication databases – Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. We pre-processed the following data for each study: topic, authors’ location of university affiliation, study area, year of publication, top-cited articles, top productive journals in publishing dark tourism studies, keywords, and internality/externality of the author from the study area. With the current paper, we analysed review articles published from 1996 to 2024 (first quarter), applying qualitative methods. Based on these, a new analytical framework was generated. Furthermore, the connections between research topics were also analysed. The results of the analysis highlight specific research gaps in the literature on dark tourism and address poorly visible research fields in international journals, e.g. terrorism-related research, social media links of dark tourism, postcolonial contexts, or commemoration of communist past and heritage. Consequently, certain countries and regions are underrepresented in the literature. This critical review offers new research areas but also gives some directions to the theoretical enrichment of the dark tourism concept.