39 PEACE, CONFLICT, TOURISM AND OTHER THINGS IN BETWEEN – Contributions by Anna
39 PEACE, CONFLICT, TOURISM AND OTHER THINGS IN BETWEEN – Contributions by Anna Farmaki
I grew up in Cyprus, a small island located in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Cyprus is known for three things. First, it is recognised as a tourist destination boasting beautiful beaches, a warm climate and a rich culture that spans 10000 years of history. Second, the island became known in recent years as a potential tax haven, a credible European Union and Eurozone jurisdiction offering financial services and business activities. Third, it is often regarded as the place hosting one of the world’s most intractable conflicts that rightfully gained the nickname “the graveyard of diplomats”. The so-called “Cyprus problem” refers to the ongoing dispute between the island’s two main communities, the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots; a dispute that has gone for decades for reasons that are not the focus of this contribution and will, therefore, not be discussed here. Yet, the Cyprus dispute has shaped every facet of life for its people. In a way, you may say that Cypriots grew up in conflict and, even though there is currently no active violence on the island, residues of the dispute may be found in education, the media, politics and the economy remining us that it is still persistent.
Unsurprisingly, when I stumbled on the peace-through-tourism idea in the early stages of my academic career I was immediately intrigued. In essence, the peace-through-tourism tenet suggests that tourism may contribute to the peacebuilding efforts of communities that have experienced conflict as travel-induced contact improves people’s perceptions, attitudes and understanding of one another, harmonizing the relations between countries (D’ Amore, 1988; Higgins-Desbiolles, 2003; Kim et al., 2007). The word ‘peace’ is one that I heard since a young age as, alongside the word ‘conflict’, it has found its way in Cypriots’ daily lexicon. While I didn’t know what peace necessarily felt like, I knew what conflict was. And the more I read about the potential role of tourism in peacebuilding, the more I realised that conflict was largely overlooked in the peace-through-tourism literature. In fact, I felt that the peace-through-tourism narrative was romanticized in the relevant discourse and several important aspects pertaining to conflict, peace and tourism were ignored. It was this gap in the literature that led me to embark on a research journey with the aim of understanding the interrelationships of the constructs of conflict, peace and tourism and the implications of these for the peace-through-tourism notion. To be honest, that was not easy to do as I had to read and understand theories from ‘foreign’ fields. I had a marketing background and much of my past research focused on the management and consumption aspects of tourism. So, the politics of peace and conflict were unfamiliar territory to me.
Nonetheless, the study of these theories began to provide shed light and reveal s