Tourism, compounding crises, and struggles for sovereignty

Abstract

Applying justice theory in tourism studies has yielded a vibrant flourishing of scholarship in recent decades. Yet, it is still argued that a clear conceptualization of justice tourism is still lacking. Sovereignty theory has seen broad application across many social sciences in recent decades, yet despite a clear connection, the tourism scholarship has engaged minimally with the sovereignty literature. This article aims to assimilate sovereignty theory into the justice tourism scholarship by carrying out a deep historical analysis to demonstrate how destination residents negotiate chronic and acute crises in the Galápagos Islands, a place with no original human population. With global immigration projected to grow and exacerbate environmental conflicts in the coming years, the current research is well-poised to provide urgent and generalizable insights into the sociocultural underpinnings of increasing human mobility, the environmental conflicts that exist between different value systems and worldviews, and the opportunities that exist to promote improved destination management on behalf of human wellbeing in places experiencing intense in-migration. Historical analyses are thus critical to understanding the subjective and temporal nature of struggles associated with justice-centric concepts, including but not limited to sovereignty.