Mid Sweden University

In this chapter, through conversational and reflexive dialogue, we explore the ontological, epistemological and methodological challenges associated with conducting research on peace-through-tourism. We base our discussion on our time in the field in both Colombia and Israel/Palestine. Our focus primarily lies on the need for greater sensitivity when researching the concept of peace - a deeply contested concept that means different things in different times and spaces. We argue for a greater use of insights from peace and conflict studies, and of methods that can capture some of this complexity. We also discuss the ethical and emotional difficulties of research in places suffering from the traumas of war, and raise questions about how scholars should represent those working for peace under such conditions. Our chapter concludes by questioning what contribution our continuing research agenda should make.

This work emerges from the encouragement of peace studies scholars to seek out commonalities that can unite rival sides in a conflict. Based on this call, I propose the unifying approach to peacebuilding through tourism as one where tourism initiatives use unifying points (such as figures, sites, stories and symbols) that help conflicting sides see commonalities and thus facilitate cross-cultural understanding. In particular, I look at how the story of Abraham (communal father of Jews, Christians and Muslims) appears to be used as a guiding fiction for the work of two tourism initiatives in Israel and Palestine. Based on mixed qualitative data, I use Creative Analytic Practice to present two semi-fictional stories that explore this use of Abraham, exposing the potential benefits and risks associated with striving for a unifying peace in an arena as charged as the Israeli-Palestinian context. These stories reveal that the unifying approach provides a valuable vocabulary of progress that challenges the dominant sectarian narratives of tourism in the region, yet simultaneously rubs awkwardly against the sharp divisions and imbalances of the Israeli-Palestinian context.

Grounded in an understanding of tourism as a political phenomenon that has consequential impacts on how we understand people and space, and in an understanding of peacebuilding as a participatory process that must involve ordinary citizens, this thesis explores the relationship between tourism and peace. Taking inspiration from the confidence of global organisations and tourism scholars that tourism has a role in peacebuilding, I explore how tourism could serve to challenge conflicts that are deemed intractable - conflicts that are particularly hard to solve. In choosing one of the most intractable conflicts of all, and a popular tourism destination, my thesis focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian context. This is a context where tourism has more often than not been a force for cementing sectarian narratives that fuel the conflict and in aggravating the asymmetrical division between Israelis and Palestinians. However, with new alternative forms of tourism and tourists arriving in the region, there is hope still for tourism in a process of regional peace. Using the results of four published articles, I demonstrate how there are several approaches to challenging the intractability of this conflict. Articles I and II look at two Palestinian accommodation providers that have curated provocative and artful tourism spaces that tackle the conflict head on. In these cases, tourism is envisioned as a source of education about the conflict and a forum for dialogue with the Other. Article III compares and contrasts an Israeli youth hostel chain and a Palestinian hiking trail that both use the biblical figure of Abraham as an inspiration for rising above the conflict and materialising a vision of cross-cultural harmony. Here, tourism is an exercise in highlighting commonalities and forwarding fruitful visions of regional peace. In Article IV, a radically different approach is taken where non-tourism, in the form of a tourism boycott of an Israeli mega-event, is forwarded as the best way to challenge the conflict’s asymmetry. Illuminating these cases through a variety of mostly qualitative methods, I debate the strengths and weaknesses of these differing approaches and suggest that while tourism demonstrates a remarkable ability to challenge the conflict’s nefarious master narratives, it simultaneously struggles to tackle the entrenched structural injustices in the Israeli/tourist-Palestinian relationship. Instead of supporting one approach over another, I use my findings to highlight that how peace is approached through tourism is entirely a reflection of how a certain group understands the concept of peace. With different visions of peace being enacted through tourism, challenging intractable conflicts through tourism must be seen as an ongoing process of negotiating differing visions of peace in tourism contexts. Taken in its entirety, the thesis makes several contributions to the ongoing discussion about tourism’s role in peacebuilding. These include highlighting the value of peace and conflict studies literature to tourism studies, and the need for creative methodologies that tackle the emotional and messy dimensions of tourism in conflict settings.

Baserat på en förståelse av turism som ett politiskt fenomen som har åtföljande effekter på hur vi förstår människor och rum, och på en förståelse av fredsbyggande som en medverkandeprocess där vanliga medborgare måste involveras, så utforskar den här avhandlingen relationen mellan turism och fred. Genom att ta inspiration från den övertygelse som globala organisationer och akademiker inom turism har, i att turism har en roll i fredsbyggande, så undersöker jag hur turism skulle kunna utmana konflikter som anses särskilt svåra att lösa. Jag har i min avhandling valt att fokusera på den israelisk-palestinska kontexten, vilken är en av de mest svårlösliga konflikterna, men samtidigt en populär turistdestination. Detta är en kontext där turism har mer ofta än sällan varit en kraft för att cementera sekteristiska narrativ som eldar på konflikten och som förvärrar den asymmetriska maktuppdelningen mellan israeler och palestinier. Nya, alternativa former av turism och turister har emellertid börjat anlända till regionen, och det finns på så vis fortfarande hopp om turism som en del av en fredsprocess i regionen. Genom att använda resultat av fyra artiklar visar jag att det finns flera tillvägagångssätt att utmana den här konfliktens svårhanterlighet. Artikel I och II tittar på två palestinska turistlogier som har utformat provokativa och konstnärliga rum för turism som tacklar konflikten rakt på. I dessa fall ses turism som en källa till utbildning om konflikten och ett forum för dialog med De Andra. Artikel III jämför och kontrasterar en israelisk vandrarhemskedja och en palestinsk vandringsled som bägge använder den bibliska personen Abraham som en inspiration för att höja sig över konflikten och förverkliga en vision om mångkulturell harmoni. I denna artikel är turism en övning i att lyfta fram gemenskap och förmedla fruktbara visioner om fred i regionen. Artikel IV tar ett radikalt annorlunda grepp där icke-turism, i form av en turismbojkott av ett israeliskt evenemang, lyfts fram som det bästa sättet att utmana konfliktens asymmetri. Jag belyser dessa fall genom att använda mig av olika, mestadels kvalitativa, metoder. Jag diskuterar styrkor och svagheter med dessa olika tillvägagångssätt och föreslår att även om turism visar en anmärkningsvärd förmåga att utmana konfliktens vedervärdiga narrativ, så kämpar den samtidigt med att tackla de djupt rotade strukturella orättvisor som finns i den israelisk/turist-palestinska relationen. I stället för att ta parti för ett tillvägagångssätt framför ett annat så använder jag mina resultat för att lyfta fram att hur fred och turism kan närma sig varandra är helt beroende av hur en viss grupp förstår begreppet fred. Med olika perspektiv på hur fred kan komma till uttryck genom turism så måste svårlösliga konflikter som utmanas genom turism ses som en pågående process av förhandlingar mellan olika sätt att se på fred i en turismkontext. Tagen i sin helhet så ger denna avhandling flera bidrag till den pågående diskussionen om turismens roll i fredsbyggande. Dessa inkluderar värdet av att litteratur inom freds- och konfliktstudier används inom studier av turism, samt att kreativa metodologier är nödvändiga för att hantera känslosamma och trassliga dimensioner av turism i konfliktområden.

The authors explore the multiple relationships between military occupations and tourism. The arrival of a foreign military power can have devastating consequences on a nation’s tourism industry. The destruction of war, the burden of sanctions, and the imposition of martial law, new rules and currencies, and restrictions on movement can all work to cripple the tourism supply and demand of a newly occupied territory. While giving attention to such negative consequences, in this chapter the authors also highlight other more unexpected aspects of the tourism–occupation nexus. In particular, they focus on the ways in which tourism provides opportunities for occupiers to profit from and justify their occupation. At the same time, it is also clear that tourism can be used to challenge occupation and to destabilise the occupier’s narrative. To explore these various relationships, the authors review the literature on tourism and military occupations that takes in events ranging from the British occupation of Napoleonic France in the early nineteenth century to the Russian occupation of Ukraine today. They complement this review with insights from their fieldwork in Palestine.

According to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, tourism's social impacts should stretch beyond ensuring greater equality and opportunity, and should also foster peaceful societies. This chapter explores the impact tourism can have on peace, exposing arguments for and against the notion that tourism is the world's "peace industry". Reflecting on a divided academic debate over this proposition, we suggest that a problem in our ability to evaluate tourism's impact on peace is the existence of, at best conflicting, at worst absent, conceptualizations of peace amongst tourism scholars. Using literature from relevant disciplines, such as peace studies, we explore these different conceptualizations of peace and suggest that tourism scholars need to be far clearer in our understanding of peace. This, in turn, will enable us to more clearly evaluate tourism's impact on peace.

As tourists become more politically conscious, the number of boycotts grows. Despite their proliferation, tourism boycotts rarely succeed. This study explores why tourists reject boycotts in the context of mega-events that are often subject to boycott calls. The paper focuses on the attempted boycott of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv, Israel, by the Palestinian activist group BDS. Qualitative and quantitative insights from a questionnaire sent to tourists who attended the event provide several reasons for boycott rejection. Tourists were antagonistic to the boycott and shared concerns about its rationale, deeming it unnecessary and unwarranted. This was motivated by a desire to keep the Eurovision free of the contested politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The findings highlight the potential risks of using boycotts in tourism, where boycott demands of non-consumption rub against the innate desire for consumption (or self-gratification) in tourism. Based on these findings, the paper suggests alternative ways of working for peace through tourism in settings of intractable conflict.

Stemming from a frustration with the rigidity of categories within tourism studies and their associated violence of finalization and narrative entrapment, this paper sets out to trouble the formation of tourist/m categories within the context of contested space. Using an evocative collaborative autoethnographic approach, three personal narratives are provided by three different tourists whose positionality attaches them to the contested space of Bethlehem, Palestine, in different ways. These narratives highlight the problems associated with trying to categorise tourist experiences in landscapes that speak very differently to different people. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how the process of bringing together competing narratives of space through collaborative autoethnography can serve as a valid exercise in transformative dialogue.

This chapter looks at the role youth hostels play in challenging some of the destructive narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian context, narratives revolving around Othering, and demonisation of the Other. To understand the role of hostels in this regard, the authors use the concept of transformative dialogue to demonstrate how hostels assist in the formation of partnerships between previously hostile groups, and also how hostels provide a tourism forum for self-expression and exposure to divergent narratives of space. The chapter is a comparative case study using qualitative data gathered at 14 hostels over a period of six years. The findings of the chapter stress the remarkable achievement of youth hostels in the region in challenging hegemonic discourses of separation and abjection, despite the enormous difficulty in doing so.