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The geopolitical turn in tourism geographies

Tourism is one of the most far-reaching geopolitical practices of the twenty-first century. With more than one billion tourists crossing national borders annually, tourism is a critical site of everyday geopolitical encounters between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests.’ In addition to the materiality of geopolitics, since the 1990s, scholars have examined geopolitics as ‘a discourse that describes, explains and promotes particular ways of seeing how territorial powers are formed and experienced’ (Kearns, 2003, p. 174). Over the past decade, tourism-focused scholars have increasingly engaged with the role of geopolitical discourse and practice in tourism, ushering in what can be described as the geopolitical turn in tourism geographies (Dowler, 2013; Hall, 2017; Hannam, 2013; Hazbun, 2004; Mostafanezhad, 2014; Ojeda, 2013; Rowen, 2016). Scholarship on the role of tourism in securitization, territorialization, migration, statecraft and nation-building, for instance, is growing in volume and deepening in theoretical rigor. In this commentary, I highlight several of the current and potential contributions of geopolitical thought to tourism geographies. The post-structural critical turn in geopolitics has driven the development of new approaches to examining the role of discourse, texts and meaning in the formation of geopolitical imaginations and their material implications (Agnew, 2003; Dalby, 1991, 2008; Tuathail & Agnew, 1992). Critical geopolitics was developedin part, through the recognition of geopolitics as an everyday experience that occurs outside of policy-making and academic discourse (Dittmer & Gray, 2010, p. 1667). Recent work on ‘everyday geopolitics’ examines how people enact geopolitics through quotidian experiences and encounters (Dittmer, 2010). The critical geopolitics framework offers scholars of tourism new conceptual tools from which to retheorize recurrent themes in tourism studies such as placemaking, sustainability and host-guest encounters. An examination of the layers of mediated relationships crafted between tourism actors can reveal the combined logics of institutions, discourses and practices (e.g. photographic surveillance, social media representations, etc.) as well as helps to illustrate how the ‘geo’ is ‘graphed’ in tourism by placeand space-making processes. While the contribution of geopolitics to tourism geographies is wide-ranging, four key sub-themes within geopolitical thought that are particularly relevant to the field: geopolitical ecologies, popular geopolitics, feminist geopolitics and imperial geopolitics.