Heritage, Culture and Politics of Tourism Along the New Silk Road

After twenty years of the UNWTO’s Silk Road programme, there seems to be a new impetus to revive and re-envision the project to bring the heritage and cultural attractions along this ancient set of trading routes to a new prominence. A recent conference in Dunhuang in August 2013, the addition of a 30^th nation into the Silk Road project, together with an action plan for the future that will build a sustainable and competitive tourism product suggests a fresh impetus and a desire for collaboration and tourism development. But to what extent does the Silk Road project offer real potential for sustainable tourism development? And what lies behind the rhetoric of the Silk Road Action plan? This paper seeks to address the politics and discourses of international collaborative tourism marketing projects with a focus on the Silk Road initiative. Whilst the aims of the project are laudable, the paper seeks to understand the power dynamics at play between these nations and the role of the UNWTO. The countries along the Silk Routes that have signed up to the project include some of the most politically unstable in recent history and the paper hopes to shed some light on the tensions between an ideal of peace and intercultural understanding through tourism development and a political, economic and social reality. The papers approaches the issues through the adoption of discursive analytical perspectives on texts: policies and planes, strategies and media items.