Political Impacts of Tourism: A Critical Analysis of Literature

Abstract

Tourism and politics are inexorably allied. There exists adequate literature on the nexus between political ideologies and public institutions yet, there is hardly any explicit attention paid to the field of tourism research. It may perhaps due to the impression that ‘politics is all about power.’ In fact, Gramscian’ s notion of ‘power-over’ in the context of preserving cultural hegemony confines the prospects of political discourse to ‘power-itself’. This notion was contested through a poststructuralist thought, ‘power-to’, proposed by Michel Foucault. Thus, the present paper extends the poststructuralist thought by exploring the potential areas in politics that shape the outlook of the tourism industry through a critical analysis of literature. The study argues that the associated political effects are critical to the field of tourism at the same time the tourism industry is also a potential means to promote and showcase the political ideology.