Emeritus Professor Richard Butler’s latest book – ‘Tourism and War: A Complex Relationship’, co-edited with Dr Wantanee Suntikul of Macau - is released this month (August) by Routledge. It builds upon an earlier publication by the same editors, “Tourism and Political Change”, published in 2010 by Goodfellow Publishers.
The volume draws on a range of examples, from medieval times to the present, to reveal the multi-faceted development of tourism amidst and because of conflict in a wide variety of locations, including the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Africa and South East Asia, showing the diverse ways in which tourism and war interacts. In doing so it explores how some locations have been developed as tourist attractions primarily because of war and conflict, e.g. as resting and training places for troops, and others flourished because of the threat of danger from conflicts to more traditional tourist locations.
This thought-provoking volume contributes to the understanding of the inter-relationships between war, peace and tourism in many different parts of the world at different scales. It will be valuable reading for all those interested in this topic as well as dark tourism, battlefield tourism and heritage tourism.