Tourism, peace and sustainability in sanctions-ridden destinations

Abstract

Despite the widespread use of sanctions as a foreign policy tool in the absence of armed intervention and as a means to promote peace, there is notable absence of research on the effects of sanctions on the peacebuilding capacity of tourism and their relationship to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This situation is surprising given that both sanctions and tourism are promoted as a force for peace and reconciliation processes. Drawing upon international relations and political science and via semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in the Iranian tourism and hospitality industry, this study investigates whether sanctions contribute to peace and create an environment suitable for tourism development. The findings indicate how the imposition, relaxation and then re-imposition of sanctions by international state actors as a means of peace have paralyzed the Iranian tourism industry through its psychological, sectoral, and societal effects and mobility restrictions. The consequences of sanctions and their sharp contrast with the SDGs are also explored. This study fills a significant gap in tourism research by examining the implications of the application of a widely used coercive geopolitical tool of statecraft in relation to the peace and tourism nexus.

KEYWORDS:

• Sanctions
• crisis
• peace through tourism
• reconciliation
• sustainable development goals
• geopolitics of tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siamak Seyfi

Siamak Seyfi is an Assistant Professor at the Geography Research Unit of the University of Oulu, Finland. Using an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach, his research interests focus on tourism politics and geopolitics with a primary focus on the MENA region, cultural heritage, resilience, sustainability as well as qualitative sociological/ethnographic research methods in tourism.

Colin Michael Hall

Colin Michael Hall is a Professor in the Department of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Docent, Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland; and Visiting Professor, School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, Kalmar. He publishes widely on tourism, sustainability, global environmental change and regional development.

Tan Vo-Thanh

Tan Vo-Thanh is an Associate Professor at La Rochelle Business School – Excelia Group, France. His main research interests include sustainable tourism, tourist engagement, relationship quality, impacts of ICT on consumer behaviours and management, tourism destination attractiveness and competitiveness, wine tourism, and green human resource management.