Description
This article explores how tourism drives and enables accumulation by securitization. We examine 25-years of world heritage and global biodiversity conservation discourses and practices in the Maya Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala to identify four mechanisms of governance through which tourism facilitates accumulation through processes of securitization. These include: 1) territorial enclosure and militarization of tourism spaces, 2) global heritage protection, 3) practices of subject formation, and 4) the articulation of tourism development with transnational security strategies. Each of these securitization mechanisms provides an additional frontier for accumulation related to tourism with clear implications for social and environmental justice. Drawn from more than ten years of combined ethnographic and collaborative research in northern Guatemala and building from literatures across tourism studies, security studies, and political ecology, this article suggests that accumulation by securitization plays a key role in processes of tourism expansion and its related dispossession, violence, and exclusion.
