INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH
Int. J. Tourism Res. 8, 153–155 (2006)
Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.564
Special Issue
War and Tourism: an Introduction
Although there is a genuine paucity of research
that explores the relationship between war and
tourism, there can be little doubt that the ‘the
consequences of military conflicts have serious
and indeed negative impacts on the develop-
ment of tourism’ (Vukonić, 1997, p. 9). Irre-
spective of the conflict in question, wars
provide an extremely negative environment
and an almost impossible set of conditions
upon which tourism can survive. In his book
Tourism in the Worldwind of War Vukonić (1997)
highlighted the fact that the majority of con-
flicts since the end of the Second World War
have occurred in countries that have not
accounted for significant numbers of tourist
arrivals. Hence, for the most part, countries
with large tourism economies have not been
affected as fully as one may have expected.
That said, all tourism economies are affected
by the instability that conflict brings. For
example, where tourism provides employ-
ment, foreign exchange, economic diversity
and infrastructure development, as it does
facilitate environmental protection and conser-
vation, war is destructive in the short-to-
medium term and often leaves a legacy that
can last for generations.
Although the research base to date is some-
what limited, a number of thematic areas are
worthy of further scrutiny. To start redressing
the balance, this special issue deliberately set
out with a very open agenda but with the spe-
cific intention of avoiding volume data and
trend analysis, as these are available in many
other publications. At the outset, the three
editors anticipated manuscripts that incorpo-
rated elements of tourism, safety and security,
identity building and nationhood, interpret-
ation and heritage, visitor behaviour, war
as an attraction, market development and
niche opportunities, dark tourism, battlefield
tourism and authentication of the war tourism
product, to name but a few. Upon receipt of a
large number of manuscripts after the first call
for papers was made, the reviewing process
has resulted in six refereed papers and two
refereed research notes being selected for
this special issue.
The first paper by Lee explores the legacy of
the Korean War on the development of the
tourism industry in South Korea, with an
emphasis on the broader post-conflict nation-
building benefits that accrued to the country.
The paper traces the causes of the Korean War
and its subsequent impacts upon the develop-
ment of tourism in South Korea, with the prin-
cipal findings indicating that the war had a
significant impact upon the notion of tourism
as a ‘good’ industry for wider society. Further,
it helped create the idea in society that purely
consumptive travel is ‘unpatriotic’ and that
people should think about the interests of the
nation holistically when they travel.
The focus of the second paper by Taylor is
somewhat different in that the broader context
is the management of crises and the recogni-
tion of the essential role played by the mass
media in the strategically constructive diffu-
sion of information. Following a brief discus-
sion with regard to the relationship in the
media between perception and reality as it
relates to the tourism industry, the author
applies the elaborate likelihood model (ELM)
of persuasion to strategies for attitude
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
154
intervention and manipulation to facilitate
market recovery from acts of conflict.
A very different style of paper is presented
by Knox, who explores the sacralised land-
scapes of Glencoe in Scotland. Knox’s paper
makes use of the example of Glencoe to illus-
trate the processes through which performa-
tive acts and utterances make and remake the
sacralised landscapes of what some have
termed ‘dark’ tourism. Through the repeated
telling or citation of stories about the massacre,
and about the associated Highland War,
Glencoe is repeatedly fixed and figured into
discourses relating to fear, terror and blood-
shed. The rhetoric surrounding Glencoe today,
as both a site and as a tourist product, and
through which the collective remembering of
the events of 1692 is enacted, is overwhelm-
ingly related to one historic incident and the
relation of that incident to a particular vision
of the Scottish nation. Visitors frequently
report finding the glen a haunting, frightening
and menacing place; popular photography
depicts dark and shaded mountainsides, aban-
doned settlements and memorials that evoke
similar feelings. By conducting a tracing out of
connections between the material landscapes
of Glencoe, historical and contemporary repre-
sentations of the glen, and tourist representa-
tional practices, this paper sheds some light
on the performative power of language and
practice through, in and over history, heritage,
tourism and landscape.
Hannam, meanwhile, notes the lack of
tourism research that has examined the
contested representation and consumption of
heritage in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
His paper discusses the contemporary politics
of heritage tourism in India and focuses upon
contested representations of The First War of
Indian Independence/The Indian Mutiny of
1857. The severity of this conflict has been
written about extensively from both British
and Indian perspectives. Moreover, this con-
flict provided the rationale for the extension
of British imperial rule in India. One site in
particular — the ‘British’ Residency at
Lucknow — was and still is remembered as an
important memorial to both the British and the
Indians who died in this conflict. However, the
representations of the conflict are and have
been contested. Hannam’s paper thus exam-
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
War and Tourism: an Introduction
ines this heritage dissonance by examining
both official and lay representations of the
residency.
The fifth paper, by Cooper, on war battle-
fields in the Pacific explores Japanese battle-
field tourism and examines the subject in the
context of the curious paradox in the way the
Japanese see themselves and their country on
the world stage. On the one hand there has
been assiduous promotion of the idea that
Japan has always been an isolated island
nation, poor in natural resources, unable to
understand the outside world and constantly
struggling to break from Edo-period isolation-
ist shackles as an explanation of its involve-
ment in the Pacific War. On the other hand the
country now enjoys its status as the second
largest economy in the world and has been a
leader in rapid economic development for
more than 60 years since 1945, based solely on
internationalisation. This dichotomy has in
fact been very useful in avoiding discussion of
the actual impact of Japan’s imperial past on
its subject peoples (and on its own veterans),
as the new Japan should not be seen as being
in any way responsible for the old Japan.
Cooper’s paper discusses the ongoing debate
on Japan’s involvement in the Pacific War
1941–45, the development of Pacific battle-
fields as tourist destinations, and makes some
attempt to portray and explain present-day
attitudes to battlefield tourism amongst the
veterans and populations of both sides.
The sixth paper by Agrusa, Tanner and
Dupuis explores the potential for American vet-
erans of the Vietnam War returning to Vietnam
as tourists. For a variety of reasons, Vietnam is
one of the latest Asian countries to declare the
importance of tourism to national develop-
ment. Although for almost two decades fol-
lowing the end of the conflict it was illegal for
American tourists to travel to Vietnam, the re-
establishment of diplomatic ties between the
USA and Vietnam has initiated a new era of
commercial and cultural relations between the
two nations. This particular paper was devel-
oped to estimate the potential interest of war
veterans in returning to Vietnam as tourists,
with some very mixed results providing some
most interesting outcomes.
This special issue concludes with two
research notes: one on tourism development in
Int. J. Tourism Res. 8, 153–155 (2006)
DOI: 10.1002/jtr
War and Tourism: an Introduction 155

Iraq, and the need for support from interna- Alan Fyall
tional academia, by McGahey; the other on Bournemouth University, UK
war and ecotourism in the national parks of
Colombia, by Ospina. Bruce Prideaux
It is hoped that the papers featured in this James Cook University, Australia
special issue serve as a catalyst for future work
Dallen J. Timothy
in this area and help the tourism community Arizona State University, USA
— both academic and practitioner — under-
stand more fully the complex relationships January 2006
that exist between the two extreme activities of
war and tourism.

REFERENCE
Vukonić B. 1997. Tourism in the Worldwind of War.
Golden Marketing: Zagreb.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Tourism Res. 8, 153–155 (2006)
DOI: 10.1002/jtr