More thoughts on core-periphery and tourism: Brexit and the UK Overseas Territories

ABSTRACT

This article draws on recent debate in Tourism Recreation Research regarding issues of core-periphery and the sustainability of small island tourism. Using the context of Brexit it is concerned with the core-periphery relationship inasmuch Brexit affects subnational island jurisdictions (SNIJ) on a number of fronts including trade, financial aid, access and mobility, identity and tourism. Framed within a postcolonial lens the paper extends the notion ‘decolonizing without disengaging’ to argue for a ‘revisionary core-periphery’ approach in which periphery becomes re-inscribed by a substantial political shift (Brexit) that inverts, or reimagines peripheral islands as sites of reciprocal power projection. As such, the longstanding core-periphery narrative surrounding small island development is revised in an analysis of Britain’s 14 Overseas Territories including a case study of Pitcairn Island. The paper makes a conceptual and empirical contribution to existing knowledge within tourism studies generally, and more particularly in its study of SNIJ as places of differentiated development processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• subnational island jurisdictions
• core-periphery
• island tourism
• Pitcairn Island

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Maria Amoamo is a Research Fellow at Otago University. Her current research draws on social anthropology to examine aspects of cultural change and sustainable development in small island states and Subnational Island Jurisdictions (SNIJs). She is particularly interested in how SNIJs can be examined as prototypes of innovative governance; how they provide evidence of alternative and viable models of sustainable development, and the mainly dyadic relationship with the metropolitan or colonial power and its cultural, judicial and administrative legacy.

Notes

1. The study of islands on their own terms.

2. The 14 UKOTs comprise Anguilla; Bermuda; British Antarctic Territory; British Indian Ocean Territory; Cayman Islands; Sovereign Base Areas of Cyprus; Falkland Islands; Gibraltar; Montserrat; Pitcairn Islands; St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha; South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands; Turks and Caicos Islands; and British Virgin Islands (UK Government House of Commons, 2014).

3. Her Majesty’s Government.

4. Departements d’outre-mer.

5. Gibraltar is treated for many purposes as if it were a Member State of the EU with citizens voting in EU elections as well as the Brexit campaign.

6. 90% of the UK’s biodiversity is located in the UKOTs (www.defra.gov.uk2012).

7. Biodiversity for Life (B4Life) initiatives have allowed UKOTs to work in tandem with NGOs such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds on projects to manage invasive alien species in Montserrat, Pitcairn, BVI, Turks & Caicos and Cayman Islands.

8. Quotes are referenced by page number attributed to the reference House of Lords (2017).