By Sarah Becklake
In 2015, the United Nations published its 2030 Agenda for global sustainable development. Within global tourism policy, there are two dominant priorities connected to this Agenda:
(1) make tourism more sustainable and
(2) provide the safety and security that all tourism depends on.
While the former is concerned with making tourism work better as a tool for global sustainable development (see UNWTO, 2018), the latter is concerned with protecting tourism and, thus, its promise of global sustainable development (see UN Tourism, 2024a). Following rising incidences and concerns over disasters, war, terrorism, violence, crime, political instability, and social unrest, as well as health, financial, and technological crises, tourism policymakers are increasingly focusing on safety and security for tourism (ibid.).
In doing so, they are promoting the development and implementation of diverse socio-technical security practices and strategies that aim to create tourism that is ‘attractive in times of peace and resilient in times of crisis’ (ibid.: 8). The heightened global emphasis on safety and security for tourism-driven global sustainable development is clearly evident in the UN General Assembly’s declaration of 2027 as the ‘International Year of Sustainable and Resilient Tourism’ (Resolution 78/260). UN Tourism’s Safety of Destinations initiative and its three-part white paper Security and Safety in the Tourism Sector also address this issue (UN Tourism, 2024a, b, c). While certainly not new, this suggests that tourism is presently going through intensified securitisation.
A Critical Take on Tourism Security Practices
Within security studies, ‘securitisation’ refers to the process through which an issue becomes integrated into a security framework (see Buzan et al., 1998). A security framework emphasizes threats and their risks to a designated ‘security referent object’, which is an object deemed worthy of protection (for example: the state, the economy, the environment, the good life, human life). This, in turn, justifies and compels the development of security practices and strategies aimed at protecting the respective security referent object from potential threats and risks.
Critical security studies interrogate securitisation processes. For example, they examine ‘who is made (in)secure where, how, why, and with what consequences’ (Le Billon, 2015: 70). In this context, Prof. Didier Bigo argues that while security practices are justified by their claimed ability to create reassurance, protection, and certainty, they can also generate ‘unease, uncertainty, and new struggles’ (2012: 125). Bigo therefore suggests the concept of ‘(in)securitisation’, which highlights how ‘[i]nsecurity and security may grow simultaneously’ (p. 126).
From a critical security studies perspective, it is therefore important to consider not only what tourism security practices intend to do – that is, protect tourism from a diversity of threats and risks – but also what their wider unintended effects and consequences may be, and who is affected by them, where, why, and how.
Practices to Strengthen International Tourists’ Security
Drawing upon critical security studies, my research focuses on tourism security practices that aim to make international tourists feel safe enough to visit a destination and keep them from actual harm while visiting (Becklake, 2021, 2023, 2025). These practices include touristic assuring, disciplining, bubbling, and webbing.
- Touristic assuring aims to give tourists the trust and confidence that they have nothing to fear and often employs marketing and censoring strategies. For example, destination marketing campaigns employ discursive strategies to challenge risky imaginaries in efforts to make places appear familiar, hospitable, and safe for tourist consumption. Alternatively, censoring strategies focus on controlling the spread of potentially touristically damaging information, narratives, and images.
- Touristic disciplining aims to encourage behaviours supportive of tourism and often employs pedagogical and coercive strategies. For example, Tourism Awareness Programmes work to sensitise citizens to the national value of tourism, as well as teach them how to behave ‘properly’ towards tourists. If citizens engage with tourists in the ‘wrong’ way, they are likely to find themselves the targets of public and private security forces deployed to protect tourism and tourists (e.g. tourism police forces).
- Touristic bubbling aims to make spaces and places safe for tourists and often employs privatising and fortifying strategies. While the construction of private, sanitised, and barricaded all-inclusive resorts is the most well-known example, city centres, national parks, heritage sites, and transportation systems are also being touristically bubbled, often through the development and deployment of public and private security forces.
- Touristic webbing aims to secure tourists on the move and often employs surveillance and chaperoning strategies. For example, tourists are increasingly being encouraged to use digital applications and services that promise real-time security information, advice, and assistance, no matter where they are located. Alternatively, tourists may be provided with police or military escorts as they move through ‘risky’ spaces and places.
While done in the name of protecting tourism (and its promise of sustainable development), social science research from Latin America shows that these security practices and their corresponding strategies are reproducing diverse inequalities, as well as undermining the human rights and human security of already marginalised and vulnerable populations (see Becklake, 2023). This highlights two interconnected critical points: first, that some tourism security practices are undermining global sustainable development, and, second, that in so doing, they are feeding into an endless process of (in)securitisation.
Tourism Security Practices Can Undermine Sustainable Development
It is not only critical social science research that complicates any simplistic argument linking tourism security practices with tourism-led global sustainable development. In fact, UN Tourism also notes that tourism security practices:
can, sometimes, undermine the principles and goals of sustainable tourism development. For example, the personal security of tourists may be prioritized as being more important than that of local citizens, or efforts to secure space for tourists – in the form of enclaves or routes – may violate citizens’ human right to freedom of movement within their own countries. (UNWTO, 2018: 97)
While this acknowledgement should signal the urgent need for reflexive evaluation of all tourism security practices’ wider effects and consequences, to date evaluation is frequently reduced to how well they protect tourism stakeholders, activities, and sites (see, e.g.: UN Tourism, 2024a). As tourism policymakers and stakeholders increasingly promote the development and implementation of socio-technical security practices, the need for greater independent research and civil society oversight becomes all the more important.
In particular, there needs to be research and oversight regarding: what socio-technical tourism security practices exist and are emerging; how they are being enacted, experienced, and contested in different places and by different people around the world; how they are contributing to and/or undermining global sustainable development; and, perhaps most importantly of all, how they can be transformed – in practical and radical ways – to better support a world that is inclusive, just, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable for all. This vital work is needed if we want to interrupt endless touristic (in)securitisation.
Dr. Sarah Becklake has a PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University and is currently a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Institute for Sociology at Leibniz University Hannover. She has interdisciplinary expertise in theorising, investigating, and interrogating the global tourism system, and has published her research in numerous academic journals, including: Geopolitics; Tourism Geographies; Globalizations; Conflict, Security, and Development; Space and Culture; Geographische Zeitschrift; and, Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft.
References:
Becklake, S. (2021). Gendered touristic security: The case of Guatemala. In M. Mostafanezhad, M. Córdoba Azcárate, & R. Norum (Eds.), Tourism geopolitics: Assemblages of infrastructure, affect, and imagination (pp. 207–230). University of Arizona Press.
Becklake, S. (2023). Touristic security: Not a ‘win-win’ global security practice. Conflict, Security & Development, 23(4), 289–316.
Becklake, S. (2025). The neocolonial securitisation of mobilities: (Re)producing (in)fragilities, (in)securities, and (im)mobilities. In J. Becker, M. Bös, & S. Çakır (Eds.), Fragility of global migration: Exploring a constitutive aspect of migratory forms. Springer.
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