Politics and Borders

The debate around the right to travel is underdeveloped in tourism scholarship because the issue of access in tourism is frequently perceived as a market issue and is less frequently situated in a socio-political context. When it comes to tourism mobilities, nation-states have undeniable impacts on who, when, and for what reason individuals are able to freely cross international borders. However, disciplinary power and control are not only associated with nationality but also with the intersectionality of, for example, gender, class, religion and race.

Frustrating tourism mobility further in recent years has been the proliferation of walls around the world. These walls contribute to the fortification and militarisation of borders (Vallet, 2014). Tourism has a complex relationship to these walls, and to borders more generally (Dallen, 1995, 2002, Wachowiak, 2006), and the entanglements of tourism with these walls, borders and forms of control are in need of further investigation.

We invite papers that engage in the following topics (indicative but not exhaustive themes):

• Borders as touristic places
• Places of immobility/repression of people on the move (checkpoints, doors, barriers, control)
• Places of security and insecurity, containment, porosity, and transgression.
• Borders as a place of (conflicting) interactions between different stakeholders (security forces, tourists, refugees).
• Border zones as places of commerce and an economic system is created to manage them