Where’s the Harm in Tourism?

This chapter critically explores the tourism industry through the lens of harm, discourse, and coloniality (power). It reveals how exotic imageries of paradise and discourses of sustainable development mask, negate, and normalize far-reaching harms, from exploitation, exclusion, and infringement of local communities’ human rights to cultural erasure and environmental degradation. It also shows how promoting tourism by powerful institutions like the World Bank under the guise of development reproduces colonial relations of power between the Global North and Global South, with most profits flowing back to the Global North instead of enriching the local economies in the South. Using the decolonial concept of coloniality, an ubiquitous and enduring matrix of power that shapes global and local hierarchies, it illuminates how tourism reinforces economic, epistemic and racial domination constituted during colonialism. Following decolonial thinking, it positions tourism as an energetic site of modernity and its darker side, coloniality. Doing so unravels the harms of coloniality (death, destruction, ecocide) masked and legitimized under the guise of successive ‘benevolent’ discourses of modernity: civilizing mission, modernization, progress and development. Tourism then becomes an essential site of modernity’s and coloniality’s entanglement, which continues to justify violence, exploitation and exclusion under the disguise of development, security and freedom.