Competitive lieux de memoire in a post-socialist dark tourism context: an explorative study of a Slovenian case

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study sheds light on competitive lieux de memoire in the south-east of Slovenia that are directly related to significant social changes of the twentieth century. The aim is to evaluate the perceptions of influential domestic stakeholders, including experts and media, representing (different) perspectives of the transformation of sites of memory into national and transnational spaces of memory in the dark tourism context. We carried out 10 interviews and a qualitative inductive content analysis, and a subsequent qualitative deductive content analysis of 16 news media articles. Creating an Euler diagram, we compared real social and media-created reality and found inconsistencies: only three main categories are common. We found that development issues are highlighted within social reality, while the media mainly report on what was observed on the ground, at sites or events. Despite the polarised Slovenian post-socialist atmosphere, competitive memories gradually become multidirectional with the potential for the commodification of lieux de memoire within international dark tourism.