Tourism in Conflict: A Comparative Study of Conflict Tourism in the North of Ireland and Palestine

In the case of societies that are currently enduring conflict, settler-colonialism, and apartheid, and those that have begun to transition towards a post-conflict society; conflict tourism has become a very popular niche within their wider tourism industry. Conflict tourism in the context of this research is understood as conflict related tourism practices within a society experiencing conflict or one that has experienced conflict in living memory. This niche has been created to appeal to the consumer desires for “authenticity” and the “real” stories of conflict. Potentially transformative to a society and economy transitioning to post-conflict or an essential ongoing income stream during the instability of conflict; once formed within a society, contested narratives vie for dominance in this space and are put to purpose by agents and stakeholders in pursuit of their own political ends. These agents include state led nationalist projects, for-profit commercial enterprises, grassroots NGOs, and individual actors. This research follows an interdisciplinary approach to comparatively analyse the conflict tourism industry in the North of Ireland as a society undergoing a peace process and transitioning towards post-conflict, and Palestine as a society that is experiencing ongoing and escalating asymmetric conflict in the form of settler-colonialism, apartheid, occupation, genocide, and resistance. I propose that an analysis of the role played by this industry in these contexts is possible by focusing on issues pertaining to: (a) the prominent aspects of these tour encounters, (b) the structure of this industry and methods of narrative construction and presentation in each context, and (c) the role played by authenticity and power in terms of agency and authorisation to engage in this industry. By deciding to focus on these three core issues a better understanding of the role played by the conflict industry in societies experiencing a different stage of conflict is to be gained. This project utilised ethnographic qualitative research methods, amounting to 45 semi-structured interviews with people working in, advocating for, and being affected by the conflict tourism industry in their respective contexts, ethnographic participant observation of over 75 conflict tourism activities across both contexts, and autoethnographic reflective practice of my own participation in these activities and experiences. The findings of this research indicate primarily the relevance of conflict temporality in how the conflict tourism industry manifests in and impacts upon each context in question across each of the three issues I noted above. Additionally, two potentially generalisable and transplantable hypotheses have been generated concerning firstly a framework for understanding the strength of conflict narratives both in terms of their presentation and the support they receive from their audiences; and secondly the application of an adapted version of Smith’s (2006) Authorized Heritage Discourse as a framework to understand authorisation, authenticity, and agency within not only cases of conflict tourism, but any case of tourism globally.