The new tourism geopolitics: bridging tourism geographies and political geography

In this introduction to the special issue, The new tourism geopolitics, we call on scholars to bridge tourism geographies and political geography through the framework of tourism geopolitics. The issue offers novel conceptualizations that extend beyond the study of material borders, passports, and nation-state discourses. Rather, the authors of this issue home in on the entanglements between tourism and geopolitics in the form of events, everyday interactions, ideologies, political economies, and celebritized people and places.The introduction outlines several increasingly pressing questions around the geopolitics of tourism, ones that for too long have been marginal in tourism geography and relatively ignored in political geography. We further identify how political maneuvers at international and domestic, state and non-state, and macro and micro levels trigger the proliferation of geopolitical dilemmas for tourism practices, policies, and flows. The eleven papers in this curated collection offer critical points of departure for bringing tourism and political geographies together to reveal discordant relations of power and oppression in tourism. In doing so, the introduction and papers that follow compel us to account for the significance of tourism in the intimate and extraordinary geopolitical structures of power that shape our lives and our world.