Peacebuilding and post-conflict tourism: addressing structural violence in Colombia

Abstract

The contribution of tourism to peacebuilding in areas emerging from destructive conflicts has been primarily examined from the perspectives of economic recovery and reconciliation between antagonist groups. Yet we argue that the study of the tourism-peace nexus in post-conflict spaces should engage further in analysing issues of power, social justice, and development. The present article aims to enrich this debate by discussing the case of Montes de María, a war-stricken Colombian region where empowered communities are harnessing tourism as a means to defend local visions of peace and sustainable development, while neo-liberal approaches threaten to create new forms of dispossession in the post-conflict transition. Drawing on qualitative research, we explore the opportunities that tourism presents for the rural communities in the region to resist structural violence and support their emancipatory struggle for self-determination and the defence of their livelihoods.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-conflict tourism
• structural violence
• positive peace
• Colombia
• Montes de María

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes on contributors

Mónica Guasca is a doctoral researcher at the Division of Geography and Tourism at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. She currently studies the role of bottom-up tourism initiatives in peacebuilding in Colombia. Her research interests lie primarily in the socio-economic development of societies recovering from war, focusing on the role of local agency and spatial configurations in post-conflict transitions.

Dominique Vanneste is a full professor at the Division of Geography and Tourism at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. Her research focuses on regional and destination development and (cultural) heritage with an emphasis on identity building and preservation. She works on tourism networks and the role of brokers, as well as on heritage tourism as a lever for development. Further, she studies the relationship between war heritage and tourism from a memoryscape perspective.

Anne Marie Van Broeck is a senior lecturer at the Division of Geography and Tourism at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. Her main research interests and lecturing topics are related to the Anthropology of Tourism (socio-cultural dimensions of tourism) and to Tourism and Conflict (conflicts caused by tourism; tourism in a context of political tensions; contested heritage). She has a strong interest in Colombia, where she lived several years.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Rural Land Gini Index is a measure of the degree of concentration of rural land at a defined time in a specific spatial reference unit. It takes into account the number of people who exercise the legal right of ownership over the land. The indicator takes the value of 0 when rural land is not concentrated, meaning that the land is equally distributed. The increase in value of the indicator represents a greater degree of concentration of the rural property. The indicator takes the value of 1 when the land is fully concentrated (Instituto Colombiano Agustín Codazzi [IGAC], n,d; own translation).