Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (review)

There is a paucity of research on tourism in the Middle East, all the more so on the political economy of tourism, despite the salience of the sector to several of the region’s economies — Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, and increasingly Dubai in the UAE, among others — and the important political and social controversies that commonly attach to the growth of Western tourism to non-Western states. Waleed Hazbun’s new book is a welcome addition to the literature, and contributes to the debate not only on tourism in the Arab world, but also on the dynamics of globalization, identity, and political economy in the region. It should be of interest to a range of scholars, not only in Middle Eastern studies and tourism studies, but those focused on political geography and international political economy as well.

Hazbun situates the work in the realm between international political economy and Middle Eastern studies (p. x), and places a particular emphasis on linking tourism to globalization. As with his doctoral dissertation,¹ he emphasizes in the book the concept of “reterritorialization” within globalization. Hazbun rightly notes the focus in studies of globalization on deterritorialization, but argues that in the case of tourism, the sector also can act as a force for reterritorialization. By this he means that tourism can create spatially defined nodes of development where territorial features, far from being undermined by globalization, are actually strengthened and accentuated (p. xvi). This argument is largely convincing, especially in terms of linking space and territory to the processes and outcomes of economic globalization. However, as an aside, one wonders whether the cultural features attached to such territory have, through tourism, become increasingly artificial, unterritorialized constructs: many resorts in the region that claim to be culturally “authentic” are anything but. Hazbun debates the issue of cultural production and representation, but more detail on some aspects of this would have been welcome.

Chapter 4, on tourism in Jordan, is engaging, although a major dynamic in Jordanian tourism in the late 1980s and the 1990s was the state’s use of it as a cushion against the impacts of economic liberalization: a link between tourism, globalization, and the peace process that Hazbun might have developed in greater depth. While he makes some fascinating points about popular Jordanian perceptions of Israeli tourists, and the oscillations of the peace process in the 1990s, I would have linked this to the business-government relationship and the dynamics of liberalization more forcefully. Hazbun mentions this dynamic at the start of the following chapter (p. 189), and deftly discusses rent-seeking and state control in the Kingdom, but could have given the liberalization dimension greater emphasis.

An excellent contribution of the book is its highlighting of how regimes have been able to embrace elements of globalization, tourism most particularly, and yet at the same time — in fact through this process — reinforce their rule and the regime’s durability. To those observers who expected globalization to undermine regimes by removing their dominance over political discourse and by creating new public spaces to contest the state’s authority, Hazbun’s observation here is especially important. He demonstrates how regimes have hijacked cultural production and regulated the local particulars of globalized tourism so as to build and fortify their control.

The book is well researched, and is based on good theoretical investigation mixed with primary research, but strangely is missing a couple of key references: Yorghos Apostolopoulos et al.’s Mediterranean Tourism² does not seem to have been consulted — despite it being one of the few books covering Middle Eastern tourism in some depth — nor the articles from the special feature on Mediterranean tourism in the July–August issue of the Thunderbird International Business Review.³

Overall, however, Hazbun’s work is very well-researched and well-crafted. Indeed, the...