Why do countries allow dark tourism? A review study

Dark tourism is a type of tourism that involves a visit to places connected with death, misery, suffering, atrocities, and crimes. Although there are thousands of dark tourism sites in the world that are categorized into war-related, disaster, cemeteries, holocaust, the number of researches showing the critical purposes of promoting dark tourism sites by the countries is missing. This study probes into the available research material from the journals to search for reasons dark tourism is allowed against the three possible situations of educational purpose, for generating revenue or for motivation and sympathy. This review paper conducted qualitatively using a secondary source of data of published articles from the 2000s onwards using a keyword of dark tourism. As a result, 15 research papers were randomly selected, and the findings showed that the main two reasons countries allowed dark tourism were for educational purposes and revenue generation while motivation or sympathy is subject to the type of site. Despite the limited data collected and analyzed, this study would contribute to dark tourism's study as it highlights the purpose of dark tourism.