Bordering, ordering and othering through tourism: the tourism geographies of borders

Abstract

The interplay between borders and tourism has fascinated tourism geographers for decades. However, only recently has tourism geographies research on borders mirrored border studies by interweaving tourism with its spatial, cultural, political and economic embedding in order to understand tourism’s socio-spatial place-making and bordering effects. We utilize the highly influential framework for border studies of van Houtum and van Naerssen to reflect on the state of the art of the tourism geographies of borders and make sense of recent developments in the field. The framework focused on the bordering, ordering and othering of society and space, referring, in turn, to creating a sense of boundedness, a process of meaning-making and a process of socio-spatial distinction through the symbolic and material construction of borders. We show that after decades of often descriptive research underpinned by state-centered understandings of how territorial borders have influenced tourism’s growth and development, recent developments in tourism geographies started linking up process-based understandings of borders with reflections on tourism’s place-making role. Our review highlights two important points. First, while massive strides have been made in recent years regarding the process-based understanding of tourism’s constitutive role in bordering processes (and vice versa), the cross-pollination between border studies and tourism geographies research on borders is still incomplete. Second, there is a need to move beyond insular tourism research to see how tourism’s place-making role related to borders and territory manifests in practice. We conclude that tourism is deeply embedded in bordering, ordering and othering society and space, both as an expression and as a driver of, or agent in, these processes, leading to tourism-specific impacts on the spatial environment and to broader socio-spatial (and inherently political) place-making outcomes.

Keywords:

• Cross-border tourism
• borderlands
• regional development
• tourism imaginaries
• transfrontier regionalization
• tourism geopolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arie Stoffelen

Dr Arie Stoffelen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, KU Leuven, Belgium. He is interested in: tourism and regional development; governance and planning of tourism; bordering processes and cross-border cooperation; and landscape–tourism interactions.

Dallen J. Timothy

Dallen J. Timothy is a Professor of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University, Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Julie Anne Wrigley Global Institution of Sustainability, Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, and Visiting Professor at the University of Girona, Spain. His tourism research focuses on borders and geopolitics, development in the Global South, religiosity and pilgrimage, and cultural heritage management.