Abstract
One of the first industries developed in frontier regions, tourism opens new land and commodity frontiers through practices of primitive accumulation that can radically disrupt the reproduction of social relations of production. However, very little work explicitly addresses the role of tourism in frontier‐making practices. This paper brings political economy and critical geopolitics to bear on the role of tourism in the development of new land and commodity frontiers in the South China Sea and Myanmar. Geopolitical ambitions are played out under the guise of tourism development and are obscured by the assemblage of institutions, discourses, and practices (e.g., photographic surveillance, social media representations, place branding) that aid in the appropriation of the “free gifts” of not only nature, but also human nature. The state is integral to the extraction of use values of non‐human and human nature: territorialisation, dispossession, and enclosure are all fundamental to this process. Additionally, as people and places (e.g., beaches, cultural practices, ethnic identities) become legible as commodities, so too do they become alienated from the products of their labour. This paper sheds analytical light on the ways in which powerful mechanisms of the tourism industry legitimise the creative creation of new land and commodity frontiers.
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