Eco-war tourism

Affective geographies, colonial durabilities and the militarization of conservation

Bibliographic Data

ID8075152
AuthorsEsther Marijnen (0000-0002-2960-7151, Wageningen University & Research, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume53
Issue6
Pages550-566
Publication date2022-10-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSecurity Dialogue (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0967-0106 • E-ISSN: 1460-3640
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/09670106221112215
OpenAlexW4306174529
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited48

This article introduces ‘eco-war tourism’, a growing niche in which tourists venture into war zones to seek adventure and ‘save’ nature from its violent surroundings. In Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, such tourists can experience the ‘threat of mortality’ while visiting mountain gorillas, contribute to the survival of the park and supposedly participate in regional peacebuilding. This article considers how the amalgamated commodification of war and gorillas leads to the bunkerization of tourism, the reconfiguration of space into ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ areas and the militarization of conservation. It links critical security studies and political ecology to theorize how eco-war tourism intensifies green militarization and how militarized conservation itself becomes a spectacularized tourist attraction. Eco-war tourism is informed by, and productive of, various affective geographies, entrenched in colonial durabilities that produce Eurocentric ideas about how and by whom nature should be protected. I call for critical security studies to examine how diverse security interventions – e.g. military, tourism, humanitarianism and conservation – are entangled in and reconfigure inherently political nature–society relations and underscore the futility of approaching ‘society’ and ‘the environment’ as separate fields of security

Adventure · Colonialism · Commodification · Democracy · Economics · Economy · Militarization · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Tourism · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law

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