Violence and dispossession in tourism development: a critical geographical approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article introduces a special issue that illustrates how violence and dispossession frequently define everyday practices, livelihoods and representations in tourism. The authors take a relational approach to violence, emphasizing how violence's many forms (physical, symbolic, epistemic, structural, etc.) interweave in practice to produce the built tourism environment, creating unequal power relations between “hosts” and “guests”. The special issue's papers provide five historically and geographically specific articulations of tourism, violence and dispossession in Paris, Guatemalan forests, rural Honduras, faux South African shantytowns, and O'ahu, Hawaii. They reveal recurring themes of enclosure and extraction, erasure and commodification, “destructive creation,” and (neo)colonialism. This introductory article draws on the special issue's guest editors’ ethnographic research in Colombia and Guatemala to elaborate on the key concepts of tourism development, violence, dispossession and spatial fetishism underpinning these themes using a critical and geographical approach. Attending to violence in tourism allows contributors to identify more sustainable forms of tourism development. These include redefining “sustainability” as Indigenous and Native sovereignty, advocating for grassroots and collective forms of tourism, reducing tourism's role in climate change by traveling locally, and contesting the reproduction of colonial itineraries and practices of “Othering”.