Description
This paper contributes to the emerging field of critical tourism geopolitics by examining how tourism itself functions as a mode of governance. Rather than asking how tourism should be governed, it reorients the question to explore how tourism governs – how it enacts power and shapes geopolitical relations. Drawing on empirical examples from across the Global South and North, the paper analyses tourism’s entanglement with coloniality, political economy, and security, revealing how these dynamics produce hierarchical and exclusionary relations that are often obscured in mainstream governance frameworks. It argues that tourism governance as commonly practiced reinforces global inequalities and fails to address the structural causes of displacement, dispossession, and environmental degradation. By engaging with critical geopolitical theory and mobility studies, the paper highlights how tourism reproduces a global (im)mobility regime that privileges certain mobile subjects (e.g., tourists) while marginalising others (e.g., migrants). Ultimately, it calls for a shift toward mobility justice, challenging dominant narratives of tourism as a benign force for development. This approach offers new insights into the performative and transformative effects of tourism on institutions, spaces, and populations, and underscores the need to rethink tourism governance through a critical geopolitical lens.
