Violence and dispossession in tourism development: a critical geographical approach

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”.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism development
• violence
• dispossession
• enclosure
• commodification
• (neo)colonialism

Introduction

For many tourists, entrepreneurs and public policy designers alike, the idea that violence and dispossession define tourism is counter-intuitive. Many people associate tourism with being on vacation, with paradisiacal landscapes, and just getting away from everyday life. For others, however, everyday tourism practices are intimately related to diverse expressions of violence in various forms, of which dispossession is a prominent expression. This distinction often hinges on one's socio-spatial positioning and embodiment, as well as on one's location within the tourism industry's direct or indirect activities -- whether or not one is the tourist, the “host”, the developer, the hustler, the sex worker, hospitality staff or the fisherman. Violence in tourism settings comes in the form of physical, horrific, extra-ordinary events, such as terrorist attacks and narco-turf wars, but violence also manifests in the spaces and silences of everyday life, in the loss of land, community and language. Even in alternative forms of tourism, like ecotourism and volunteer tourism, where environmental sustainability, learning and community strengthening are at the center of what tourists look for, conflict is often thought of as incompatible with the tourist experience.

Violence in tourism appears paradoxical in part because of the industry's ability to obscure the constitutive violence that produces paradise found in multi-million dollar advertising campaigns, privatized man-made beaches, whale watching and slum tours. We call this dynamic tourism's spatial fetishism. Instead of narrating multiple, co-existing and contentious histories, identities and relations that define place, tourism's spatial fetishism paints an imaginary picture that reflects the ideals and desires of their creators and marketing agencies (Salazar, 2012). This imaginary picture has concrete effects; it materializes in the production of spaces, natures and subjects. When “hosts” and their allies challenge tourism's spatial fetishism, state-sponsored violence can be the response. In this way, tourism development is linked to the consolidation of state territorialization, practices of nation-making and military and colonial projects (American Quarterly, 2016; Enloe, 2000; Hyndman & Amarasingman, 2014; Stein, 2008).

The aim of this paper and of this special issue is to explore the strong connections between tourism and different forms of violent dispossession, using a critical geographical approach. We use the lens of dispossession to examine tourism's violent geographies because doing so renders clear the many ways that violence in tourism occurs. The papers in this special issue illustrate how diverse practices of dispossession in tourism manifest in violent practices and recurring themes of enclosure and extraction, erasure and commodification, destructive creation and (neo)colonialism. In diverse settings, such as Hawaii, Honduras, Paris and Guatemala, contributors detail how tourism drives violent practices of land privatization and dispossession, extracts natural and cultural resources, erases existing histories and peoples from the landscape, and “destructively creates” new socio-natures, identities and commodities based on partial and power-laden tourism imaginaries. Noel Salazar's afterword provides insights on these contributions and the growing interest in tourism and violence more broadly. The critical tourism studies approach employed in this special issue draws on critical theories of race, gender and post-colonialism, as well as geographical concepts like space, place, territory and uneven development. We thus employ a critical geographical approach, contributing to new trends in tourism studies that delve into the violence inherent to tourism, and not just to violence's positive or negative effects over the industry (American Quarterly, 2016; Andrews, 2014; Ecología Política, 2016; Fletcher & Neves, 2012; Nepal & Saarinen, 2016).1.

We do not claim that tourism alone creates the conditions of dispossession and violence to occur, but we seek to provide a closer look at the multiple and interwoven ways the production and performance of the tourist experience –the constant making of sites, ecologies, subjects, experiences and the bodies involved– hinge upon and result in deeply uneven and violent geographies. The tight linkages between tourism and capital accumulation, tourism and colonialism, tourism and sexism, and tourism and militarization, are evidence of this. These linkages are not pre-existent, but the result of particular processes and dynamics that need to be better understood in order to imagine and build less violent and more just and “sustainable” forms of tourism. Despite efforts to promote sustainable tourism within the development and management process, it is important not to overlook how many problems still remain (Carr, Ruhanen, & Whitford, 2016; Douglas, 2014).

The papers in this special issue provide geographically and historically specific examples of how violence and dispossession unfold in everyday practices of tourism development in ways that illuminate global patterns, power relations and political possibilities. These papers are not comprehensive or representative, but provide diverse yet related examples of the many forms of violence occurring in paradise and wilderness. In doing so, special issue contributors advocate for reconceptualizing “sustainability” in tourism and development more broadly. Suggestions for doing so include shifting the focus away from eco-sustainability defined by western conservationists and craved by the industry's greenwashing strategies, to a definition and practice of sustainability prioritizing sovereignty, renegotiating the terms of hospitality, ending the cultural commodification and appropriation of minority and Indigenous people by white westerners, and practicing local, less environmentally harmful ways of traveling and being in places defined as destinations.

Tourism development

We use the term “tourism development” rather than the tourism industry or simply tourism for two main reasons. First, tourism development refers to an ongoing process, rather than a singular event (the visit), or a person (the tourist). Instead of analyzing tourism as different ideal types of tourism (cultural, eco-, dark, voluntourism, etc.) or foregrounding the phenomenology of the tourist experience, this special issue's articles tack back and forth between an analysis of long-term processes of socio-spatial transformation and the mundane ways tourism affects people's daily lives and livelihoods. This approach illustrates how tourism is not just a capitalist industry, it is also equal parts (neo)colonialism and militarism, and is inextricably linked to living histories of colonial exploration, science, and conquest. Comparing the spatial overlay of colonial, military and tourism routes and itineraries ties these temporalities together.

Second, when we use the term “development”, we are not referring to the process of economic development as measured by increasing per capita incomes or gross domestic product. We also are not referring to sustainable development as green, pro-poor or poor-friendly growth or a way to make nature “pays its own way” (McAfee, 1999). Rather, we draw on Gillian Hart's (2001) ideas of big “D” development and little “d” development to foreground the intertwined practices (big “D”) World-Bank-led “D”evelopment as a political project of intervention into the “Third World” in the name of poverty alleviation, and the uneven spatial expansion of capitalist (little “d”) “d”evelopment (see also Cowen & Shenton, 1996; Escobar, 1995). Hart notes the dialectical nature of D/development, that is, the simultaneous, intertwined, contradictory and often contested unfolding of projects of poverty alleviation and capitalist development in the tourism industry. Our focus on D/development seeks to decenter the tourist and even the host as objects of analysis to focus on power relationships between tourists and tourism workers, between large-scale tourism development and dynamic socio-natural systems.

Violence

Creating tourism destinations frequently includes violent practices of commodification (Colucci & Mullett, 2016; Fletcher & Neves, 2012); land dispossession (Benjaminsen & Bryceson, 2012; Mbaiwa, 2005; Neumann, 1998); enclosure and privatization (Gardner, 2016; Kincaid, 1988); militarization (Davis, 2015; Gonzalez, 2013; Lunstrum, 2014); and the marginalization of local peoples (Azarya, 2004; Gregory, 2007). Rather than focusing on how violence negatively affects the industry, we seek to build from recent work that pays close attention to violence and tourism as intrinsic. The September 2016 special edition of American Quarterly, for example, foregrounds the relationship between militarism and tourism, what the special edition editors call “militourism”, by emphasizing a feminist geopolitical approach in diverse time spaces (Gonzalez, Lipman, & Teaiwa, 2016). In equally groundbreaking work, contributing authors to the collection Tourism and Violence (Andrews, 2014) advance the conceptualization of the different forms of physical and symbolic violence interwoven with travel and tourism. With the intention of understanding the violence of tourism as such –and not under euphemisms such as “crime” and “terrorism” that insist on violence as extraordinary-- the authors further explore violence as fully part of tourism experiences and development. Furthermore, they see in tourism myriad opportunities for better understanding violence and its cultural manifestations. Despite the available literature, the strong connections between violence and tourism still occupy a marginal place within intellectual and political circles. As Navas, Blázquéz, and Murray (2016) state in the introductory article to the special issue “Political ecology of tourism” (Ecología Política, 2016), “the sweet vision of tourism” has meant that social conflict, environmental destruction and colonialism are usually its hidden face. From a similar perspective, Nepal and Saarinen (2016) examine the lack of political ecology studies on tourism despite the industry's long history of environmental devastation. In this edited volume, different authors focus on the need to study tourism in relation to dispossession, displacement and the disenfranchisement of local populations.

Our approach to studying violence pays close attention to how different forms of domination, exclusion and suffering are actually lived and understood, as well as contested and reworked. Rather than debating different definitions and categorical types of violence, we take a relational approach to understanding violence that emphasizes and explores how multiple forms of violence build upon one another. This allows us to identify and disrupt the interlocking of physical, structural, symbolic and epistemic violence in the narratives and practices that make tourism sites and experiences.

Not only do we pay attention to extraordinary events that represent a significant rupture in a community's or individual's trajectory, but we also emphasize how violence becomes part of everyday life (Coronil & Skurski, 2006; Das & Poole, 2004; Das, 2007; Jimeno, 1998). In particular, in the case of tourism, it is very important to expand the notion of violence beyond the presence or absence of conflict. Our ethnographic research in Colombia and Guatemala has led us to consider violence as a multidimensional and relational phenomenon. Symbolic and epistemic violence manifest in many forms in tourism in the Petén (Guatemala) and Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia), from acts of cultural appropriation in performances and postcards, to the erasure of people, languages and landscapes in touristic historical narratives. Violence in tourism comes in the form of “tourism imaginaries” (Salazar, 2012) that materially manifest in peopleless wilderness spaces and pristine, white sandy beaches. The commodification of culture and place in tourism often constitutes an act of epistemic and symbolic violence as most tourism imaginaries engage in orientalist practices of “Othering” local inhabitants (see Said, 1978). These material and symbolic “tourism imaginaries” reflect the stereotypes, ideas, ideals and desires of their designers, rather than the multiple and often conflicting place-based identities overlapping in any given space characterized by tourism development.

In both Colombia and Guatemala, tourism development has been used as a “peace-building” strategy that enables and justifies intensive militarization and new forms of state-sanctioned violence. Both countries have suffered long histories of armed conflict that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, displacing millions (Guatemala Never Again!, 1999; GMH, 2016). The United States Central American Intelligence Agency and War on Drugs played a shared role in producing this horrific violence, and today, citizens in both countries struggle to find peace. The extremity, scale and horror of these two interwoven national histories render the links between physical violence and its relational epistemic and systemic forms exceptionally clear; however, violence in tourism is not a product of these two particular histories and their unique military connections to the United States. Rather, state-sponsored violence in tourism expands beyond militaristic incarnations and US--Latin American neo-imperialist relations.

Tourism works as a socio-spatial regime of transformation in everyday life in places around the world (Stein, 2008). Tourism destinations are replete with spatial configurations that include legal and property rights frameworks, itineraries, land-use regulations, enclosures, ecologies and set ideas about who is a tourist, what is tourable and what is desirable to the tourist eye. Touristic socio-spatial regimes define (in)appropriate, and often (il)legal, tourable objects and subjects, and attempt to regulate and transform socio-natural relations by direct coercion and repression. In her study of Israeli tourist itineraries in Palestine, Stein (2008) shows how tourism is situated in uneven geographies and histories of movement and incarceration. Her work evidences how Israeli leisure practices in the region have been made possible by the itineraries followed by soldiers, immigrants and refugees. Devine (2014) explores how eco-tourism development in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere enables the revival of civil war time practices of counterinsurgency, which range from remilitarization of the reserve, to defining Indigenous people as internal enemies, to violent evictions. In Ojeda's (2013) research in Colombia, tourism appears at the center of a state project based on security proliferation and the mobilization of fear. While the internal armed conflict in Colombia reached its peak in violent deaths and human right abuses, strategic areas of the country were effectively positioned as tourist destinations one cannot miss. This was not a contradictory outcome, but rather the evidence that tourism was central to a security strategy that put foreign direct investment and capital accumulation over the lives of impoverished, rural populations.

Dispossession

Tourism and violence are intricately connected through multiple forms of dispossession that define everyday practices of tourism development. David Harvey's (2003) work is a needed reference when thinking about dispossession and its connections to capital accumulation (for a wider discussion, see Glassman, 2006; Perelman, 2000; Roux, 2008). In his work, Harvey revisits Marxist discussions about primitive accumulation and the violent separation of people from the means of production, signaling the spatialities of capitalism's predatory expansion. According to him, ongoing (and not just original, primitive) dispossession is necessary for the reproduction of capital. His contributions have been central to recent literature on land-grabbing in the Americas and elsewhere (Araghi, 2009; Borras & Franco 2010; Borras, Hall, Scoones, White, & Wolford, 2011). In relation to tourism, some work has focused on the connections between tourism development and dispossession in rural and urban settings (Cañada & Gascón, 2016; Mollet, 2014). We seek to contribute to these works in order to understand the violent socio-spatial reconfigurations tourism development often implicates.

Different studies have pointed out that analyses of dispossession cannot be limited to its most common definition of losing possession over a good through the use of force (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013; Hart, 2006). As we contend, dispossession entails a violent process of socio-spatial reconfiguration through which communities’ capacities to decide over their livelihoods and forms of life are limited. In words of Dianne Rocheleau (2016), “dispossession is the cooptation of the capacity to reproduce life”. In that sense, it goes beyond an event, to point out sustained practices that involve different temporary and spatial scales. Dispossession can occur in situ, that is, without necessary displacing of local communities. This is very common in tourist sites, as dispossession associated to tourism development often translates into the privatization or enclosure of commons such as water sources, beaches and forests. It is related as well to the loss in local communities’ autonomy. Dispossession here flags the practice of being dispossessed of an object, a cultural artifact or practice, or a land use, but dispossession also signifies being dispossessed of the right to one's own heritage, history and recognized presence in space.

In our work in national parks in Colombia (Ojeda, 2012) and Guatemala (Devine, 2014), we have examined particular tourist projects and their effects over local populations. In doing so, we have analyzed how “ecotourism” entrenches uneven geographies of resource access and show how it translates into the erosion of livelihood strategies for local community members. In the cases we study, tourism not only increases the pressure over land access and use, but also dramatically affects the everyday arrangements among people and between them and state officials, defining resource access and control, but also who belongs to the park and whose body is out of place. The erosion of local populations’ strategies of subsistence has been repeatedly reported as one of the expected consequences of tourism projects that rarely benefit the local populations directly implicated. Tourism is thus strongly associated with the deepening of uneven geographies of access to land, water, forests, among other resources. This form of dispossession, epitomized in land grabbing and water grabbing, and defined as the destruction of the relationships that sustain life, is one of the main forms of violence associated to tourism development.

Spatial fetishism

Empty beaches, pristine forests and exotic others are only some of the elements that tourism's imaginaries are made of. They sustain highly uneven spatial arrangements at the same time as they obscure the multiple forms of violence necessary to tourism development. The contributors to this special issue recognize that tourism, like all capitalist industries, exploits gender and racial inequalities and uneven development in capitalism's and the market's quest for cheap labor and exploitable resources. Yet, in tourism, unlike most industries, the identity and practices of a place, its people and natures are objects of consumption. The commodification of places, identities and experiences in tourism heightens the spatial stakes, identity politics and territorial struggles in practices of production and consumption. We identify this dynamic as tourism's spatial fetishism, a set of spatial practices in tourism that enclose, erase and re-imagine people, places and natures in violent ways. Dispossession is central to how the tourism spatial fetishism operates and produces multiple forms and expressions of violence in tourism. While special issue contributors talk about spatial fetishism in different ways, such as “tourism enclaves” (Loperena, 2017), the “tourism bubble” (Büscher & Fletcher, 2017) and the “commodification of place” (Devine, 2017), they all foreground tourism's spatial practices of enclosure, objectification and idealization as part of the industry's DNA.

Spatial fetishism physically manifests in the production of territory when tourism developers and their state supporters violently carve out tourism destinations from working landscapes and homes. Tourism's spatial fetish defines destinations as bounded units divorced from surrounding networks and relations falling outside the resort or eco-park's lines. Spatial fetishism includes the commodification of place to produce objects of consumption, from beautiful beaches to hospitable Native or Indigenous cultures. Our understanding of its central role in tourism draws on Marx's (1990 [1867]) ideas of commodity fetishism to emphasize how spatial fetishism in tourism, in all of its dispossessing incarnations, transforms extant socio-natural relations into objects of tourist consumption. This material process is also a representational and ideological one as well. Severing these ties includes privatizing spaces and resources once communally accessed, using physical violence to back up the newly penned property rights and erasing non-touristic “hosts” from luxurious landscapes. Tourism imaginaries always tell a story, and dominant global imaginaries often paint pictures of pristine landscapes and hospitable Indigenous cultures that render invisible shared histories of (neo)colonial rule and racialized oppression. The tourism imaginary, often built by transnational dreams and capital, plasters over this cut and attempts to hide the dispossession that makes paradise possible. We argue that spatial fetishism is a key element of tourist sites, as their viability depends on the enactment of security and on the concealment of the violence needed for their production (Katz, 2007, p. 352).

In that sense, spatial fetishism cannot be reduced to the marketing of areas in conflict for capitalist accumulation, nor is it solely linked to physical or manifest violence (Lozanski, 2007). The production and policing of tourism territories are simultaneously acts of symbolic and representational violence that define who belongs, who does not, what counts or does not count as history, and how subaltern cultures are commodified and identities performed. It often involves the production of particular forms of citizenship that include marketable, consumable, spatially bounded forms of difference. As such, the material and symbolic production of tourism destinations simultaneously entails the (re)production of particular subjects and natures. The fact that local communities often take on the burden of tourism development while it is carried out in their name, is also evident in the production of touristifiable subjects. Local populations are made part of the tourist experience through the production of easily consumable identities. It is in their condition as patrimony that Indigenous populations are often forced into tourism's circuit, not as political subjects (Guilland & Ojeda, 2012).

Ojeda (2013) further examines the imagined geographies mobilized by official touristification strategies, detailing the national and regional formations that have recently enabled the production of Colombia as a viable and marketable tourist destination amidst war. As she argues, in Colombia, tourism imaginaries set in motion have effectively produced a spatial fetish – an illusory space detached from the realities of its production – as they hide the violence necessary to the production of tourist sites, as well as tourism's violent effects in the everyday lives of local community members (see Katz, 2007). As in many other tourist sites around the world, in Colombia, “the concealment of violence is a condition of its performance” (Coronil & Skurksi, 2006, p. 12) and the limits between sites of violence and peace are blurred (Giles & Hyndman, 2004).

The special issue

The special issue contributions explore how diverse expressions of violence and dispossession are central to the production and maintenance of tourism destinations and practices. They also illustrate that in many times and spaces tourism functions as a socio-spatial regime defining territory, socio-natural relations, racial hierarchies, histories and landscapes. The articles in this special issue illustrate the central role tourism plays in reproducing racism and sexism routed through colonial histories in the form of the built environment, hierarchies of social difference and socio-natural relations. The five contributions are not representative of different types of violence and dispossession in tourism development, but capture complex couplings of these dynamics in specific times and spaces.

In these different sites, diverse practices of dispossession in tourism manifest in violent practices and recurring themes of enclosure and extraction, erasure and commodification, destructive creation, and (neo)colonialism. Enclosure is the practice of dispossessing people from access to material means of subsistence, such as land, water, food, timber, game and other resources, and is a central mechanism of primary and ongoing accumulation by dispossession. Extraction refers to the ways that tourism development functions as an extractive industry, and thus, is part of a current revival of neo-extractivism in Latin America, rather than being a green anomaly or green alternative to this trend. Erasure refers to the violent ways pre-existing definitions of place, livelihood, identity and history are rendered invisible in tourism's representational practices. Commodification captures how the tourism industry creates capital by objectifying people and places in ways that dispossess them of the ability to define their own identities and histories. Destructive creation, a term used by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher in this special issue, insists that violent dispossession in tourism is not only destructive, it is creative, and productive of new governance regimes, socio-natural relations and power-laden identities. (Neo)colonialism flags the ways in which tourism has been, and continues to be, deeply implicated in racialized projects and practices of imperialism, as well as tourism's ongoing role in capitalism's colonization of space. Despite the many violent practices and dynamics defining tourism, several contributors also detail how tourism can serve as a site of resistance, and advocate rethinking what “sustainability” means in tourism and development.

In post-Hurricane Mitch and post-coup Honduras, Christopher Loperena argues that tourism is analogous with extractivism and, in that sense, violence is inherent to the tourist industry. Tourism and other extractive industries rely on “state orchestrated natural resource dispossession, enclosure and dispossession resulting in widespread environmental degradation and ecological insecurity for coastal communities of color” (Loperena, 2017). Tourism as a form of enclosure and extractivism takes many forms, including natural resource extraction as well as non-material resource extraction in the form of cultural appropriation and enclave development. These extractive enclosures produce deep and multi-scaled spatial inequalities that range from the micro-spaces of the beach and the hotel to epistemic and material inequalities between the “First” and “Third” worlds. Loperena argues that the remaking of space and socio-spatial relations is key to both tourism and extractivism; both are marked by outward-oriented production, the market valorization of natural and cultural resources for external consumption, and multiple forms dispossession. These racialized practices of dispossession create “tourism enclaves” that create new forms of uneven development and deepen existing patterns of spatial segregation that concretize and codify in the built environment, a form of “infrastructural violence” that “flows through material and structural forms” (Rodgers & O'Neil, 2012, p. 405, cited in Loperena, 2017, 626).

Violence in tourism is also tied to the erasure of local histories, populations and experiences. In Guatemala, these violent practices trace back to seemingly innocuous tourism representations and imaginaries defining elite-led tourism D/development of the Mirador Maya archaeology site in the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Elite conservationists and scientists working in the area use tourism development to paint the picture of Mirador and the surrounding area as an “ancient space, natural place” (Devine, 2017). Devine argues this tourism imaginary erases the forest villages nearby Mirador from the tourism landscape that workers of the Wrigley's Chewing Gum Company established a hundred years ago. This practice of historical and geographical erasure in tourism development is a form of symbolic violence, central to tourism's colonization of space, that is intimately intertwined with land claims and practices of enclosure and land dispossession. In 2002, Mirador conservation and tourism imaginaries materially manifest in a green land grab whereby national and global conservationists successfully lobbied then Guatemalan President Portillo to amplify the boundaries of the Mirador Rio Azul National Park into community forest concession lands, dispossessing forest concessionaires of their land rights and livelihoods. Following three years of fierce legal battle and political organizing, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court overturned the park's extension and restored concessionaire land rights and the integrity of community forestry. In Guatemalan cultural tourism with the Maya, practices of colonizing space combine with the commodification of people and places in tourism to often dispossesses “hosts” from the means of reproducing their own cultures and histories in a place characterized by deep and enduring racism.

Büscher and Fletcher (2017) draw on their ethnographic research in Southern Africa and Latin America to link practices of commodification in tourism to the production of inequality, waste and “spaces of exception”. Drawing on examples of dark tourism (see Lennon & Foley, 2000; Stone & Sharpley, 2008), like Shantytown stays in South Africa, these authors identify the waste, inequality and “spaces of exception” produced through practices of commodification in tourism as three interwoven sites of structural violence. Tourism not only produces inequality, waste and liminal spaces (Graburn, 2004) where people step outside their everyday social mores to pursue hedonistic pleasures, but benefits from the products of this violence. This structural violence makes tourism not only a site of disaster capitalism (Klein, 2007), but a site of destructive creation, whereby capitalism harnesses its own self-destruction as the basis of value creation itself (p. 6). Destructive creation flags that tourism is a creative process that often requires practices of violent dispossession like enclosure, extraction, erasure and commodification to produce something new, the tourism destination. Through destructive creation, tourism alters and produces new socio-natural relations, socio-spatial regimes of governance and resource management, and racial, gender and national inequalities.

In their analysis of (neo)colonialism and Hawaii's tourism industry, Williams and Gonzalez (2017) argue that Hawaiian Monarchy's ‘Iolani Palace turned tourism destination is a metonym of colonial theft. Walking us through history and the ‘Iolani Palace, the authors recount how the US-government-led tourism development of Hawaiian was a strategy of white settler colonization with the aim of eradicating Native culture and political institutions in the service of manifest destiny. “Contrary to the fantasy of tropical aloha that is its most common commodity, the conditions of everyday life in Hawai'i expose a history of dispossession and occupation that saturates its very geography” (Williams & Gonzalez, 2017, 668-9). The authors argue that “the violence at the heart of tourism” is closely connected to Hawaii's “‘militouristic’ present”, “tourism's appropriations of aloha”, and “how tourist desire aligned with the de-territorialization of sovereign space and the large-scale disenfranchisements of Native people” (Williams & Gonzalez, 2017, 669). Drawing on Derrida (2000a, 2000b), they critically unpack tourism's “ideology of hospitality” defining white cultural appropriation and commodification of aloha through the production of a feminized and friendly host, and foreground the “impossibility of the coexistence of hospitality and sovereignty” in Hawaiian tourism due to historical and ongoing dispossession of Native Hawaiians. “What is demanded of both the native and the tourist in this moment is crucial: an acknowledgement of violent histories that entail restorative justice for Indigenous disposession” (Williams & Gonzalez, 2017, 680).

In post-colonial Paris, Boukhris (2017) examines how Parisian tourism imaginaries narrate white city landscapes and histories that celebrate French colonialism and reproduce racial inequalities among “Native” French and colonial subjects, immigrants and their decedents. For Boukhris, tourism embodies the racial contractions of post-colonial France, where dominant Parisian tourism imaginaries are acts of symbolic violence that are contested by those they seek to render invisible. She takes us on a tour led by black Parisians that counter-narrates French history and people of color's place in the city by detailing Paris's black geographies defined by struggles against racism and for socio-spatial belonging and equality. Her article shows how counter-narrating place and recovering alternative histories are acts of resistance for many tour operators who use tourism as a form of decolonial praxis.

While focusing on dimensions of violence and dispossession in tourism, contributors also foreground local-level resistance to violence in tourism and tourism's political possibilities for transformative change. Despite facing immense natural and political disasters in Honduras, Loperena (2017) observes how Garífuna Caribbean coastal communities organized in resistance to tourism mega-projects and their related practices of privatization, enclosure and extraction. Activists have had some limited success in delaying evictions and project construction, but the region's broader climate of political insecurity threatens these gains.2. In neighboring Guatemala, Maya Indigenous communities and ex-guerilla revolutionaries have appropriated tourism to create alternative spaces of development in small towns marked by more egalitarian land and wealth distribution, education opportunities, and access to basic health, sanitation and environmental management services (Devine 2016, 2017). In Central America's “northern triangle”, these successes are revolutionary and point to more holistic understandings of sustainability than notions of sustainability as strict environmental conservation. These grassroots efforts suggest that local, collective ownership and management in the tourism industry is critical to “hosts” retaining the economic benefits of tourism, and the means of reproducing their own histories, places and cultures.

Williams and Gonzalez (2017) call for the decolonization of the Hawaiian tourism industry and for redefining sustainability in terms of Indigenous sovereignty. Redefining sustainability as Native sovereignty entails reworking the idea of hospitality in terms of reciprocity and giving the “host” authority over his or her place (citing Meyer, 2001). From another angle, Büscher and Fletcher (2017) echo broader calls for more local-scale tourism to reduce carbon emissions as a means of pursuing another form of sustainability in tourism. In addition to addressing environmental degradation caused by tourism, these interventions emphasize the ways sustainability needs to be rethought of in terms of political and economic equality between “hosts” and “guests” in ways that suggest perhaps we should do away with the host/guest binary altogether.

Finally, Noel Salazar, research professor in anthropology at Belgium's University of Leuven, provides a reflective afterword to the issues discussed in this Special Issue (Salazar, 2017). Noel Salazar is an international polymath, with a special interest in trans-disciplinary research and in bridging the divide between academia and the wider public. Amongst many comments, he notes that alternative forms of tourism may solve certain issues, but that they also create new problems, and that there is still a long way to go in the search for truly sustainable forms of tourism.

Conclusion

This special issue advocates increased awareness and analysis of the multiple connections between tourism and different forms of violence through the lens of dispossession. Rather than defining violence in terms of types or categories, we think relationally among different forms and expressions violence in tourism, from land evictions that create peopleless parks to the commodification and folklorization of Indigenous culture in performances and postcards. The articles in this special issue illustrate how diverse practices of dispossession in tourism manifest in violent practices and recurring themes of enclosure and extraction, erasure and commodification, destructive creation, and (neo)colonialism.

While extraordinary, physically violent events take place in tourism settings, we argue it is equally important to focus on how violence ends up inscribed in everyday life and in how people experience quotidian forms of tourism-driven dispossession. While this is not a predetermined condition, evidence from around the world shows that more often than not, tourist sites are produced and maintained through violence. While tourism is not alone in creating the conditions of possibility of violence in tourism, it ends up reinforcing a conveyed order and results in new socio-spatial arrangements: enclosure of water and other commons, deepened gender stereotypes and divisions of work, destroyed local networks, etc. which are made part of how life is lived in these places. The socio-spatial arrangements that tourism requires are not ready-made, but need to be materialized and actualized. In that sense, tourism shapes what is desirable, acceptable and possible. Tourism development thus menaces particular relationalities, networks and particular forms of life and bodies – especially the ones that it depends on for labor and patrimony and privileges others in favor of commodification, sexualization and privatization dynamics.

This collection aims to inspire additional research and activism addressing the links between violence and tourism development. One of the many additional issues to explore, and absent in this issue, is an explicit gender-based analysis of violence and dispossession in tourism. This would include a focus on sex tourism (Kempadoo, 1999) and its links to shifting networks and geographies of “militourism” (Teaitva, 1999), as well as the ways tourism shapes gendered notions of racial, national and class difference (see Gregory, 2007; Thurnell-Read & Casey, 2015). Furthermore, while several articles in the issue address questions of race and Indigeneity, these are merely a few examples of the infinite articulations of historically and geographically specific racial formations with tourism's spatial fetishism and its various dynamics of dispossession.

Understanding the links between violent forms of dispossession and tourism is central to pursuing more sustainable and just forms of tourism. In the introduction, we mention, “the tight linkages between tourism and capital accumulation, tourism and colonialism, tourism and sexism, and tourism and militarization, are an evidence of this”. These linkages are not primordial, pre-existent nor permanent. As the articles included in this special issue show, these relations and practices need to be made and actualized constantly. They are historically and geographically situated and contingent, and thus, they can be unmade. That is the challenge. Despite the recognition of multiple forms of violence and dispossession in tourism, contributors identify paths to more sustainable forms of tourism development that redefine “sustainability” in terms of Indigenous and Native sovereignty, grassroots and collectively owned forms of tourism, and local travel to reduce tourism's role in climate change and the reproduction of colonial itineraries and practices of cultural “Othering.”

Acknowledgments

The guest editors would like to thank the contributors to the special issue for their participation, the reviewers for their collaboration and Noel Salazar for writing the afterword. We would especially like to thank Bernard Lane for his leadership on this special issue. Despite the immense challenges we faced along the way, Bernard continually supported this project and without him it would have never come to fruition. He is an inspiration to us both.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Devine

Jennifer A. Devine is an assistant professor of geography at Texas State University. Her research and teaching focus on US–Latin American politics, human environmental change, social movements and critical social theory. She received a PhD degree in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. She has published in, and/or has forthcoming articles in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Antipode, Latin American Research Review, the Journal of Peasant Studies and L'Espace Politique.

Diana Ojeda

Diana Ojeda is an associate professor at Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Culturales – Pensar, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). Her work combines fields such as political ecology, feminist geopolitics and cultural studies in the study of land-grabbing, conservation, militarization and tourism in the Colombian Caribbean. She received a PhD degree in geography from Clark University, USA, in 2012. She has published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Geopolitics, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Notes

1. For studies on the role that risk and the threat of violence play in the promotion of some touristic experiences, see Fletcher (2011) and Lozanski (2015).

2. The assassination of Berta Cáceres and other environmental leaders who organize in opposition to extractive transnational mega-projects in the country and region points to further dimensions of violence linking tourism and traditional extractive industries like mining and hydroelectric dams (Blitzer, 2016).