Guardians of safe passage: Anticipatory responsibility in volatile MENA tourism

Tourism to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is often disrupted by geopolitical volatility, airspace closures, shifting travel advisories and changing perceptions of safety, yet such disruption is treated as an exceptional interruption to otherwise stable flows. This viewpoint argues that stability in volatile regions is partly an illusion, sustained by destination image, traveller confidence and commercial reassurance. Revisiting the 2017 ANVR/ETFI report as a case of foresight that produced scenarios without producing obligation, and drawing on episodes of operator withdrawal from MENA destinations, it proposes that tour operators move beyond reactive crisis management and assume anticipatory responsibility: an obligation to act on foreseeable volatility before it materialises, by communicating uncertainty honestly and designing flexibility into products so that the burden of uncertainty is distributed fairly rather than concentrated on those least able to absorb it. Anticipatory responsibility is distinguished from resilience, which describes a capacity to recover, and from crisis management, which is activated by events; it is a forward-looking duty engaged while conditions still appear stable. Tour operators are positioned as guardians of safe passage: an intermediary role constituted by epistemic, architectural, and communicative capacities, obliging the operator to equip traveller judgement rather than replace it.