It burns under bombs, under the indifference and/or impotence of the masses on one hand, and the craving and greed of elites, masked as political rationality, on the other. Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, Yemen… the list could go on like a secular rosary of human suffering. The media show us the pain in streaming on our screens as a show, while international diplomacy issues pointless cease‑fire appeals while, at the same time, legitimizes a genocide (that of the Palestinian people) under the pretext of self‑defence (that of Israel).
In this scenario, where ethics vacillate and legality bends to a law of the jungle, where “All religious stuff aside, the fact is people who can’t kill will always be subject to those who can”[1], the most urgent question is: where have those bridges of understanding we thought we’d built gone? Tourism, so often celebrated as an instrument of peace, encounter, solidarity—where has it brought us so far? And what if we discovered that it has helped—perhaps unwittingly—to feed a system of inequality, deceit, and toxic narratives that are pushing the world to the brink of barbarism, in a geopolitical landscape increasingly resembling a global Far West? Has tourism failed? Tourism is not the origin of current global imbalances and conflicts, but is it complicit?
This article originated from the critical reflection I brought to the last meeting of the International Institute for Peace through Tourism (IIPT), at which I participated as Global Ambassador. At that gathering—deeply shaped by images from contemporary warzones—I urged my esteemed colleagues to ask ourselves: what has tourism actually done, and is doing, for peace? And above all: how can we prove today that our founding paradigm—“tourism as a vehicle for peace”—is still valid and credible?
We live in an era shaped by a new global power structure. The masters of the world are no longer states, but the boards of major investment funds: BlackRock, Vanguard, JP Morgan. Behemoths that manage trillions of dollars and simultaneously occupy the levers of the economy, Big Tech, central banks, even public bodies and NGOs. Their presence is as pervasive as it is invisible. In parallel, the European Union races toward rearmament—but the real battles will be fought on the technological front, where discoveries now happen in private multinational labs, not public research centres. Starlink, Neuralink, OpenAI: the new frontiers are privatized and opaque—they shape our lives and our wars.
Added to this is the crisis of democracies. Voters, disappointed and disillusioned, reward leaders who simplify reality with slogans and public enemies: Modi, Netanyahu, Meloni, Bukele, Trump… the list is long and reveals a widespread desire for authoritarian order rather than participation (Arendt & Co. are turning in their graves!). In this context, tourism has proven unable to serve as an antidote. On the contrary, it has all too often become complicit—a stylized vehicle for normalizing injustice.
Where are the fruits of decades of promoting intercultural tourism? If millions of Europeans have been to Egypt, Palestine, Morocco, Turkey, where are the signs of solidarity today? What awareness did those trips generate? If images of bombed children fail to trigger an ethical reaction—and at best evoke an Instagram story—then we must have the courage to ask: what failed in the peace education we associated with tourism? Tourism, as a practice of encounter and mutual discovery, could—and should—have generated something more: a deeper sense of global solidarity. Not merely awareness of the other, but connection, alliance, empathy.
So where were—and where are—the voices of those millions of Western travelers who roamed the markets of Hebron, sipped tea in Khan el‑Khalili, were moved by the generous sociality of the Lebanese people or the Syrian hospitality, now reduced to rubble? What global consciousness have we built if, faced with genocide, most Western governments and media not only remain silent but also justify, manipulate, and distort?
In this sense, tourism’s responsibility isn’t just structural—it’s cultural and educational. We failed to educate for peace through tourism. We settled for labels: responsible tourism, ethical tourism, solidarity tourism… But what have we truly taught? Perhaps nothing, because when tested in reality, no one can any longer distinguish right from wrong.
Maybe tourism has never been what we thought it was. Maybe it cannot truly promote justice and dialogue unless we radically change the paradigm. Otherwise, let’s admit it once and for all: it is just tourism as an economic sector, made of hospitality, marketing, and finance. A polished experiential consumption machine that tells the beauty of the world while hiding its wounds. Let’s accept once and for all that tourism failed in its educational mission because it abandoned being a transformative process. It became consumption, entertainment, “authentic” experience—authentic only in a mercantile sense. It ceased to be a relationship and became a product. It sold the Other as folklore, as a human landscape to be observed. And in this process, it helped not build bridges but reinforce stereotypes, differences, moral and economic superiority.
Behind the promises of development and progress through tourism lies the systematic destruction of territories, identities, and resources. Tourism systems more and more resemble spaces of arbitrary business, where local communities pay the environmental, cultural, civic cost, while the global tourism industry continues selling “authentic experiences” useful only for its profit narratives—emptying communities of their autonomy, land, and voice. Tourism becomes not only complicit but often a Trojan horse of neocolonial dynamics. When destination marketing hides conflicts, erases resistance, amplifies propaganda, and turns suffering into a sellable package, the line from narrative to mystification is crossed.
Here lays another dark drift: the commodification of human suffering. Hordes of Westerners file through Asian and South American slums with a look of pity toward those “poor people”, but with an unquenched Über alles in their heart! Then there’s dark tourism, which in theory should serve memory, but increasingly degenerates into emotional safaris of pain—a voyeurism (I called it “war porn” what’s often offered in war museums). In New Orleans, years ago, I witnessed appalling scenes: open‑top buses taking tourists through neighbourhoods devastated by Hurricane Katrina to photograph evacuees as if they were zoo animals—no mediation, no context, no respect. An experience that claims to “make you feel” without wanting you to understand. Even then, I thought: “Something is deeply wrong here…!”
But nothing compares to current horror. In Israel, some tour operators lead organized groups to the hills overlooking Gaza to literally watch genocide live: bombings, killed children, entire exterminated families—with binoculars and picnic baskets included. Suffering as spectacle. Death as entertainment. A level of dehumanization that breaks every moral dam. And instead of distancing itself, tourism participates, monetizes, and legitimizes.
So, the question is not just what we got wrong, but whether it’s still possible to amend. Is it possible to return to tourism as an instrument of peace, real education, and real empathy?
Or must we resign ourselves to the fact that tourism as we know it is irredeemably part of the problem? Suppose its function is reduced to marketing, hospitality, and finance, without a radical ethic of relationship. In that case, we have lost the essential meaning of travel: not to see the Other, but to recognize ourselves in the Other.
If we start from the premise that tourism is a peace tool, we must have the courage to interrogate our failure. The academic, institutional, and media narrative that for decades insisted on this axiom rarely asked: What if it isn’t so? Our duty today is to recognize the cracks in our own discourse. It is useless to wave the benefits of tourism if we’re unwilling to measure them against the real state of the world. It is pointless to talk about “understanding among peoples” if we continue to ignore that many of our established tourism models rest on structural imbalances, characterized by closed borders on one side and low-cost flights on the other, as well as commercial exotism that conceals colonial wounds never fully healed.
Tourism is not neutral. It never has been. And if we want it to be a vehicle for peace again, we must first understand how and why it has helped normalize injustice. Perhaps not all is lost. Possibly space still exists for a tourism that is just, ethical, and conscious. But for that to happen, an epistemological break is needed, a paradigm shift. Disobedience, critique, militancy. And above all, active memory: to remember that traveling was never a neutral act, but always a political choice. Either it truly becomes one, or we’d better stop calling it tourism.
[1] Phrase attributed to Sgt. Brad “Iceman” Colbert, First Recon US Marines, during the invasion of Iraq, recorded by the embedded journalist Evan Wright, who later included it in his book Generation Kill (2009).
