Holidays in the Danger Zone traces the usually overlooked connections between warfare and tourism. It shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behaviour of soldiers in war – especially the experiences of Western military populations deployed in ‘exotic’ settings. This tourist sensibility certainly includes the familiar military rotations of ‘Rest and Relaxation’ (R&R), but also more mundane episodes when soldiers transition from the battlefield into landscapes of leisure and tourism. The book also explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in post-war contexts, fro ... More

Holidays in the Danger Zone traces the usually overlooked connections between warfare and tourism. It shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behaviour of soldiers in war – especially the experiences of Western military populations deployed in ‘exotic’ settings. This tourist sensibility certainly includes the familiar military rotations of ‘Rest and Relaxation’ (R&R), but also more mundane episodes when soldiers transition from the battlefield into landscapes of leisure and tourism. The book also explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in post-war contexts, from the immediate instances of ‘Dark Tourism’ to the more established displays of conflict in museums, galleries and memorial sites. By focusing on the practices of soldiers as they become tourists and the experiences of tourists as they engage in representations of conflict, Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday entanglements between these two seemingly opposed worlds. It is primarily concerned with the extent to which war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination within historically constituted global orders. To that end, it critically examines the war-tourism nexus as it developed through 19th Century Imperialism, the ‘total wars’ of WWI and WWII, the Cold War stalemate, Globalization in the 1990s and the recent War on Terror.