Frontline leisure: Securitizing tourism in the War on Terror

Introduction: Sun, sea, sand … and terror

On 12 October 2002, a busy Saturday night in Kuta Beach on Bali, many Western tourists were drinking in Paddy’s Pub or partying across the street in the Sari Nightclub when a suicide bomber from the militant Islamic group Jemaah Islamiyah detonated a car bomb in the intersection between the two establishments. Many tourists managed to escape the carnage and find help in local clinics and hospitals, but many did not. In all, 202 people were killed in the Bali bomb attack: 80% of the casualties were international tourists in their 20s and 30s, with over half from Australia and Britain (Hitchcock and Darma Putra, 2007: 137). Just over a month later, on 28 November 2002, an all-terrain vehicle driven by members of Itihad al-Islamiya, a radical Islamic group linked to Al-Qaeda, crashed through the front gates of the Paradise Hotel Resort in Mombasa, Kenya, and blew up in the lobby. A few kilometres away at Moi International Airport, two surface-to-air missiles were launched at a charter plane returning holidaymakers to Israel. The missiles missed their runway target, but 13 people were killed in the lobby of the Paradise Hotel: three Israeli tourists and ten local Kenyans. Initially, these two sets of events seem confusing: why target innocent holidaymakers more concerned with suntans, surfing and sightseeing than global affairs? Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism responses unleashed by 9/11, Bali and Mombasa. Like much recent critical work in international relations and geography, it is interested in the forms of securitization, governance and regulation that are made possible by rendering the terrorist threat so exceptional in its scope, irrationality and intensity (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Aradau and Van Munster, 2009; Dillon and Neal, 2008; Huysmans, 2006a,b; Jabri, 2006; Neal, 2009; Odysseos and Petito, 2007; Van Munster, 2004; Walker, 2006). Drawing from the insights found in those works, this article explores the securitization of the tourism industry after 9/11, Bali and Mombasa by examining how the everyday lives of tourists and tourism workers, as well as the material infrastructure of the tourism industry, became objects of security and thus sites of political intervention. ¹

To even begin to see the different ways in which tourism intersects with the War on Terror’s matrix of exceptionality and securitization, it is necessary to acknowledge that security and governance now operate in multiple scales and sites. First, they operate through a biopolitical register in which ‘life itself’ becomes the object of security (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). Viral, microbial, bacterial, corporeal, technological and informational registers are now part of the War on Terror’s security apparatus, and are thus legitimate sites for increasingly invasive interventions made in the name of stopping terrorism. Scholars in international relations have been at the forefront of demonstrating the biopolitical nature of international borders – how they can be operationalized anywhere (e.g. in bodily organs, in abstract algorithms) and used to preemptively identify all potentially threatening forms of life (Amoore, 2006; Muller, 2011; Salter, 2008; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). Second, security and governance are not just mobilized through discourses and speech acts: they operate at a material register that brings human and non-human agents into emergent assemblages (Aradau, 2010; Coward, 2012). As Aradau (2010: 497–505) argues, materiality has been overlooked not only by constructivist approaches to securitization, but also by Foucault himself, whose idea of discourse remains wedded to a linguistic model. Third, security and governance are not reducible to state force: they also operate in the unexpected and mundane worlds of everyday life through ‘the feelings, experiences, practices and actions of people outside the realm of formal politics’ (Pain and Smith, 2008: 2). Familiar spaces (e.g. city streets, shopping malls, airports), activities (e.g. visiting the library, attending a peaceful demonstration) and routines (e.g. taking public transport, booking flights online) are now important sites of intervention where privileged bodies and forms of life are more precisely, clearly and preemptively secured against deviant bodies and forms of life (Amoore, 2007, 2009; Anderson, 2010; Nadesan, 2008; Pain and Smith, 2008). Fourth, security and governance do not simply involve the production of particular subjectivities (e.g. the terrorist, the border guard, the citizen), but also seek to transform, regulate and manage the behaviour, conduct and disposition of those subjectivities. Here, Foucault’s account of governmentality – the ‘conduct of conduct’ – has been enormously helpful in demonstrating which behaviours, attitudes and dispositions are enabled and incentivized by new forms of global security, and which are isolated and targeted (Amoore, 2006, 2007; Burchell et al., 1991; De Larrinaga and Doucet, 2010; Foucault, 2010; Larner and Walters, 2006). Finally, the security and governance mobilized by the War on Terror have a particular geopolitics. The idea that everyone is a potential terrorist, and everywhere is a potential target, does not mean that practices of security and governance occur with the same intensity or force with respect to all sites and subjects. Indeed, much critical work has exposed the familiar geopolitical cleavages that underscore liberal adventures of war, intervention and political violence, as well as less explicit forms of differentiating, controlling and intervening in populations in the name of protecting the liberal order (Amoore, 2009; Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; Dillon and Neal, 2008; Dillon and Reid, 2009; Evans, 2010; Ingram and Dodds, 2009; Jabri, 2006). All this is to say that practices of security and governance operate in pernicious ways and in unforeseen registers, which sets the context for how we might begin to understand how even the trivial life-worlds of leisure, travel and relaxation have been assimilated into the War on Terror.

This article adds to this growing body of critical work by examining how responses to the targeting of tourists on Bali and Mombasa reinforced and reproduced the discourse of exceptionalism, which in turn enabled a more intense securitization of tourists, tourist workers and tourist infrastructure. Drawing as well from the few scholars in tourism studies who critically address issues of security and governance (Cohen and Cohen, 2012; Hazbun, 2011; Werry, 2011), it begins by asking what role tourism played in the reconstitution of a cosmopolitan global community after the events of 9/11, Bali and Mombasa, and how important asymmetries within that community (e.g. between privileged tourist guests and their local hosts) were erased. The article then explores the securitizations that follow on from that articulation of global community, specifically how the material infrastructures of tourism have been transformed into ‘secure’ enclaves, and how the bodies and behaviours of tourist workers have become the site of proliferating techniques of governance aimed at protecting ‘us’ from an exceptional and immanent terrorist threat.

Cosmopolitan solidarity: Tourism and the production of global community

In his most famous speech in response to the events of 9/11, US President George W. Bush (2001a) made the famous claim, ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ Discursive analyses of the speech illustrate how the reductive binary through which Bush framed the events of 9/11 helped to produce and secure a global community of ‘civilized’ people who were being attacked by ‘uncivilized’ terrorists (Collet, 2009; Graham et al., 2004; Oddo, 2011). I am particularly interested in how tourists were positioned within this binary framing as symbols of a cosmopolitan celebration of cultural difference, diversity and inclusivity – but also crucially as diplomatic agents helping to forge solidarity between diverse members in order to present a unified response to an exceptional terrorist threat. Bush’s ‘us vs them’ resonated clearly in the expert and academic communities seeking to develop a comprehensive response by the tourism industry to the exceptional threat posed by terrorism (Blake and Sinclair, 2003; Bonham et al., 2006; Fall and Massey, 2005; Fainstein, 2002; Floyd et al., 2003; Goodrich, 2002; Mansfield and Pizam, 2006). Peter Tarlow (2006, 2005), an expert on the relationship between tourism and terrorism who frequently advises the US government on terrorism, risk management and security in the tourism industry, provided the most succinct and unapologetic distillation of this binary view: terrorists are those who engage in violent acts (including the targeting of tourists) because they come from uncivilized ‘medieval societies’, whereas innocent tourists are targeted because they come from (and therefore represent) modern, civilized, Western societies. The sociological characteristics of the ‘medieval societies’ that give rise to terrorists are: the debasement of women, a xenophobic fear/hatred for the ‘other’, the discouragement of travel, a rejection of capitalism and a rejection of individualism. By contrast, the sociological characteristics of the modern societies from which tourism arises are the exact opposite: these societies embrace other cultures, encourage travel, promote capitalist forms of economy and encourage individual expressions of choice, while, of course, women play a major role in the tourism industry (Tarlow, 2006: 82–83; see also Schwarz, 2006; Sönmez et al., 1999).

These expert voices fed into government and policy debates on how to resuscitate a tourism industry that flatlined after 9/11, and once again after the events of Bali and Mombasa. Mimicking a programme that took place after World War II, the US government introduced a number of structural and financial incentives to get Americans travelling again, restore the industry’s pre-9/11 profit levels, and help rebuild the global alliances that had perished in the ruins of the Twin Towers (Blake and Sinclair, 2003; Endy, 2004: 33–54; Fainstein, 2002; Goodrich, 2002; World Tourism Organization, 2001: 26–30). But, these economic incentives were explicitly framed by wider foreign policy goals: US policymakers were unapologetic about politicizing tourism and utilizing its capacity as ‘soft power’ to pursue foreign policy objectives. As an ideological, cultural and non-coercive force capable of disseminating American values, global tourism became a highly effective form of people-to-people cultural diplomacy that cemented the norms of a global community united against an exceptional terrorist threat (Nye, 2004). For example, George W. Bush (2001b) added holidays and vacations to the list of other consumer practices that were considered the ‘ultimate repudiation of terrorism’. In his famous ‘Let’s Roll’ speech in November 2001, Bush (2001b) declared that ‘those who travel abroad for business or vacation can all be ambassadors of American values. Ours is a great story, and we must tell it – through our words and through our deeds.’ Bush’s appeal suggested that it was incumbent upon Americans to travel abroad in order to demonstrate the desirable values of ‘their’ culture to others (e.g. freedom, tolerance, diversity, a love of travel and cultural exchange) and – to paraphrase Nye – to convince well-disposed global others that they wanted the same things that Americans did. As Americans openly wondered ‘why does the world hate us?’ after 9/11, those 21% of Americans with passports – especially members of the cosmopolitan elite who had actually travelled abroad – could ask this question with greater force: ‘Why us, who have made the effort to learn about your cultures, stay in your hotels, visit your tourist attractions, and get to know you?’ (Granitsas, 2005). Within this logic, the events of 9/11 actually strengthened the diplomatic role of American tourists: their claim of solidarity (‘we are just like you: we, too, have been subjected to terrorist violence’) made them the most convincing proselytizers of a unified, cosmopolitan global community.

The events of Bali and Mombasa threatened the tourism industry’s fledgling recovery from 9/11, and challenged the nascent global solidarity that had been mobilized by tourists in the previous year. While similar efforts were made to reassure tourists of the safety of these destinations, the scale of the Bali bomb intensified Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ discourse so that the terrorists were even more exceptional and dangerous, and all members of the global community were even more vulnerable (Gurtner, 2007). With headlines such as ‘Nabbed Bali Bomber Still Laughing at the Dead’, the mainstream Western media depicted the perpetrators as having no recognizable humanity, and their acts as exceptional cases of evil (Post Wire Services, 2002; see also Kabir, 2006; Noble, 2008). Even media outlets considered more progressive in their editorial stance took part in this reductive framing:

[Bali] was, whichever way it is looked at, an inhuman deed by people who, whatever their convictions and motives, demonstrated a lack of common feeling that places them beyond the pale of any concept of society…. Defeating terrorism must be the shared work of all humankind – for all humankind is its prey. Our common humanity demands that it be so (Guardian, 2002: 19, emphasis added; see also Times, 2002: 25; Buruma, 2002: 5).

Here, the limits of the global community are quite clear: through their placing outside the ‘common feeling’ shared by ‘all humankind’, terrorists are rendered ‘inhuman’, outside of civilization, and ‘beyond the pale’. They are, in effect, exceptional in their inhumanity: like nothing we have ever seen before. This enabled the Australian media and government to claim the ‘peaceful’ Hindu island of Bali for itself rather than leave it to perish in the increasingly militant brand of Islam developing in Indonesia. As Philpott argues, the Bali bombs constituted ‘not only mass murder, but also an attack on the thin sovereignty extended over Bali by (mainly) Australian tourists and the destruction of an idyll central to a certain Australian way of life’ (Philpott, 2005: 233–234, emphasis added). Seeking to extend Australian sovereignty over Bali, then Australian Prime Minister John Howard warned that ‘people should get out of their minds that it can’t happen here; it can, and it has happened to our own on our doorstep’ (AFP, 2002; Hitchcock and Darma Putra, 2007: 137; Pedlar, 2002).

Given the exceptional nature of the terrorist threat, the job of fighting terrorism could not just be left to Western and American citizens travelling abroad: this fight required everybody from around the world who was committed to the values of freedom, travel and cultural exchange – including all those who work in the tourism and leisure industries. Thus, Western and American tourists were placed on the same side as those ‘exotic’ hosts who served them meals, cleaned their hotel rooms, danced for them, had sex with them and sold them souvenirs. However, because that inclusive ‘we’ was marked by such obvious differences in wealth, privilege and power, it required a further production of solidarity to suture otherwise incommensurate and radically unequal subjects into a coherent and unified collective. For example, it was common for media representations to focus on what united the victims:

They were all different. But what they shared transcended the particulars of colour, language and belief. All were innocent of any offence, oblivious to any threat. All were unsuspecting of any conspiracy, all unprotected and at their ease…. Such inhumanity makes victims of us all (Guardian, 2002: 19).

Here, the democratization of victimhood after 9/11 (what Philip Roth famously referred to as America’s ‘gratuitous victim mentality’; see Leith, 2002: 2) was enabled by focusing on what the victims shared (e.g. that which ‘transcends particulars’) as opposed to the differences that might separate them (e.g. radical disparities in wealth, privilege and power; see Hitchcock and Darma Putra, 2007: 141–149). This overarching solidarity was even more explicit in mainstream media accounts of the Mombasa attack, which portrayed Israeli tourists as doubly victimized – first by the ‘Palestinian militants’ who target their everyday lives at home, and now by terrorists who target them when they are on holiday (Moore, 2002; see also Clayton and McGrory, 2002: 1; Fisher, 2002: 1; Seenan, 2002: 2).

As Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ framing resonated in expert, government and media responses to Bali and Mombasa, tourists were continually positioned within a cosmopolitan global community fighting terror. As people-to-people diplomats – indeed, as Bush’s ‘ambassadors of American values’ – tourists were best placed to generate solidarity between themselves and their hosts all over the world, and thus help solidify the external boundaries and internal identity of the liberal order. The problem, of course, is that neither tourism nor terrorism can be contained by reductive framings such as ‘with us or against us’ because the heterogeneity, multiplicity and complexity of the subjects gathered into such a binary will always exceed the limits imposed upon them.

Tourism, terrorism and deterritorialization

While Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ framing continued to resonate a year after 9/11, the more explicit targeting of tourists in the bombings of Bali and Mombasa introduced some difficulty into this binary. As documented by Guardian political cartoonist Steve Bell (2002) on the day after the Mombasa bombing, neither tourism nor terrorism could be contained by Bush’s dyad (see Figure 1). Like all of Bell’s cartoons, this one operates in several registers (Dodds, 2007). While it plays on Bush’s persona as a simpleton easily confused by weighty geopolitical matters (Bush is often depicted as a monkey), it also represents the genuinely difficult problem of how to address the unwanted aspects of globalization (e.g. terrorism) without sacrificing its benefits (e.g. cultural exchange, global travel, open borders). Bush’s confusion between ‘turrrism’ and ‘turrism’ in the cartoon points directly to this problem: the practices that most clearly symbolize and embody a cosmopolitan global community (i.e. tourism) and the practices that most clearly threaten it (i.e. terrorism) are both thoroughly deterritorialized. As the cartoon suggests, tourists and terrorists occupy the same global spaces and traverse the same routes and networks. Starting from Bush’s confusion between ‘turrrism’ and ‘turrism’, I want to suggest that properly understanding the deterritorialized conjunctions of tourism and terrorism requires, first, that we interrogate the political work that is done by reductive framings such as Bush’s ‘with us or against us’, and second, that we engage in critiques that foreground what is political about these deterritorialized practices.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Steve Bell’s political cartoon detailing George W. Bush’s response to the bombing of the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa, 28 November 2002 (Bell, 2002). © Steve Bell 1977–2010. All Rights Reserved.

The first move exposes the liberal orthodoxies and cosmopolitan fantasies that sustain the benign account of solidarity underscoring the cosmopolitan global community entailed by Bush’s ‘us’. As scholars critical of cosmopolitan articulations rightly argue, such a reductive category can only be sustained by (a) effacing longstanding structural inequalities between those privileged subjects who set the terms for membership within the community and the rest of the world who are invited to join, and (b) constituting the liberal order through repeated deployments of violence against illiberal forces both within and outside the community (Bigo and Tsoukala, 2008; Calhoun, 2002; Cheah and Robbins, 1998; Clifford, 1997: 35–36; Derrida, 2001; Douzinas, 2007; Harvey, 2000; Hindess, 2008; Jabri, 2007; Neal, 2009). Within that critical framework, tourism can be politicized for the way in which it reproduces wider ‘architectures of enmity’ (Shapiro, 1997: xi) and, in so doing, seeks to efface the many structural inequalities that it continually entrenches (Foucault, 2004; Gregory, 2004; Shapiro, 2007). The potent cocktail of solidarity, innocence and victimhood that was mobilized after terrorists targeted holidaymakers on Bali and Mombasa stripped Western tourists of any agency or responsibility in sustaining the material inequalities that existed between them and their hosts. As Peter Phipps argues, ‘tourists are caught in a dialectic of innocence whereby their very innocence as consumers propels them into being guilty participants, even agents, of global exploitation and corruption’ (Phipps, 2004: 83; see also Nicholson-Lord, 2002). As Bianchi (2007: 69) rightly argues, ‘the assumption of the tourist’s unquestioned innocence implies that the phenomenon of tourism itself is somehow suspended above or external to the machinations of state power and geopolitics’. It is precisely this ‘suspended’ position that allows any unpalatable behaviour of Western tourists – the kind that might exacerbate global inequalities – to be excused in the name of creating solidarity and countering the exceptional terrorist threat. So, for example, while Indonesians might despair at ‘drunk young infidels from Sydney and Billericay barfing all over ancient Asian culture’, they put up with it in order to receive the benefits of being included in a global community that will protect them from terrorism (Buruma, 2002: 5).

These constructions of solidarity, innocence and victimhood covered over the fact that the Balinese waiters, bartenders, cooks and maintenance staff who perished in the Sari Nightclub bomb were working in a disco that otherwise excluded Indonesians (Buruma, 2002: 5; Robinson, 2002: 16). They also silenced important moments of complexity, struggle and resistance within the Balinese community itself. For example, the Sari Nightclub at the centre of the bomb was owned and managed by a Chinese businessman and had been the site of interethnic tensions between local Balinese and migrant workers who were operating in both the formal and informal tourist economies (Hitchcock and Darma Putra, 2007: 121, 129–130; Tarplee, 2008). Moreover, local groups were increasingly vocal against a government poster campaign luring tourists back to the island with the slogan ‘Bali for the World’, arguing that Bali was not just for the enjoyment of rich global tourists but also for those who lived and worked there (Hitchcock and Darma Putra, 2007: 125). The local context of Mombasa demonstrated similar complex tensions that were effaced by constructions of global solidarity, innocence and victimhood. Leaving aside the apportioning of guilt and innocence with respect to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, the middle-class Israeli tourists who travelled to Kenya on their chartered flight exacerbated serious financial, cultural, religious and racial asymmetries that already existed between the majority Muslim population in Mombasa and those that operated in, and visited, the beach hotels and all-inclusive resorts to the north and south of the city centre. The Israeli-owned-and-operated Paradise Hotel was not anomalous in the region, as all tourist businesses in Mombasa were owned by either foreign multinationals or non-Muslims. Like the other hotels and resorts, it was one of many well-protected tourist enclaves that not only minimized contact between Western visitors and Kenya’s Muslim population, but also protected wealthy tourists from having to face the endemic poverty that surrounds Mombasa itself (Bianchi, 2003: 9–10; see also Edensor, 1998; Judd, 1999; Turner, 2010). Moreover, the tensions that led to the Mombasa bomb were well established by November 2002, and were routinely exacerbated by the arrival of US soldiers stationed in East Africa who used Mombasa’s beach resorts as a favoured R&R site (Nahdi, 2002). Indeed, it is not difficult to see how the ‘gambling, prostitution and excessive alcohol’ enjoyed by the US soldiers on leave upset the local Muslim population (Nahdi, 2002: 24; see also Bianchi, 2003: 9; Risen, 2002: 11). Here, the international media’s desire to privilege the stories of Israeli tourist-victims and reinforce their innocence effaced the complex demography of local communities in Mombasa (e.g. Muslim neighbourhoods, different ‘ethnic’ groups, foreign businesspeople, NGO workers, shipworkers on leave, US soldiers) and further silenced the main victims of the bomb – the local dancers (Wollaston, 2002: 1).

Demonstrating how articulations of global community – no matter how inclusive – continue to reproduce familiar arrangements of power is the first step in politicizing the deterritorialized practices of tourism and terrorism. It shows that the exceptional nature of the terrorist threat does not obviate, preclude or excuse the asymmetries that have long been deeply entrenched within the global community. What the exceptional nature of the terrorist threat does do, however, is produce new articulations of power that circulate in affective, embodied, biopolitical, behavioural and material registers. Thus, the second step in making sense of the deterritorialized conjunction of tourism and terrorism is to understand how our familiar dyadic axes of power (e.g. inside/outside, self/other, identity/difference, domestic/international) have become multiple, dispersed, mobile and heterogenous. This fragmentation intensifies rather than decreases the capacity of these power arrangements to order our life-worlds: as the singular becomes multiple and mobile, we are faced with real challenges in terms of how we identify articulations of violence that are both complex and adaptive. Scholars using Foucault’s notion of a security apparatus have made visible those unseen registers where calculations about danger, risk and threat take root, and by doing so have connected the techniques of governance used within the borders of liberal rule (e.g. CCTV cameras, biopolitical passports) to the illiberal practices directed outwards (e.g. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan) (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; Opitz, 2011; Neal, 2009; Salter, 2008). Using this work as a starting point, I want to analyse the complex securitization of the tourism industry that was undertaken to protect it – and ‘us’ – from the equally deterritorialized threat of terrorism. Of particular interest here is the way the securitization of the tourism industry after Bali and Mombasa transformed the very materiality of tourist infrastructure and changed the behaviour of tourist workers.

Hotel battlefield: Producing and protecting soft targets

Scholars critical of the anthropocentrism of security studies have been turning their attention to matter – buildings, roads, cars, phones, passports, clothing, drones – in an effort to show that objects, materialities and infrastructures are not passive or empty receptacles of human desires, but rather have their own vitality, agency and capacity (Adey and Anderson, 2011; Aradau, 2010; Coward, 2012; Lippert and O’Connor, 2003). Aradau (2010: 492), for example, has argued that the post-9/11 ‘critical infrastructure protection’ literature has largely discussed materiality through bureaucratic and managerial responses that ‘ask for the intervention of modalities of protection to safeguard pre-existing things and their functionalities’. Rather than understand materialities and infrastructures as being in relation or in assemblage with the humans that use them, these interventions subordinate matter to the more important goal of securing humans. This subordination of materiality shaped the response of governments, militaries and private security companies who sought to securitize spaces of leisure and travel after Bali and Mombasa through a discourse of ‘soft targets’. Defined as ‘public or semi-public (some degree of restricted access) facilities where large numbers of people congregate under relatively loose security’, soft targets allow terrorists to avoid the heightened security of places like embassies, achieve widespread media coverage and kill large numbers of Western citizens (Stratfor Global Intelligence, 2009: 1–2; see also Eyerman, 1998; Sönmez et al., 1999). Soft targets are not a new development; indeed, terrorists have always targeted civilians in highly populated civic spaces and urban infrastructures such as airports, markets, subways, churches and train stations. However, like the attack on Luxor in Egypt seven years previously, Bali and Mombasa revealed that mundane spaces of leisure like hotels, tourist attractions, heritage sites and museums had become one of the most desirable and easily accessible soft targets of choice for terrorist groups (Stratfor Global Intelligence, 2009). As one tabloid headline proclaimed: ‘Every tourist resort around the world, within striking distance of a Muslim country, is a potential target’ (Toolis, 2002: 6; see also Nahdi, 2002: 24). By suggesting that these apparently random terrorist attacks on ‘our’ places of leisure could be controlled and effectively resisted, the discourse of soft targets positioned the everyday infrastructure of tourism – hotels, tourist attractions, beaches, museums, shopping districts – as the new ‘frontline’ in the War on Terror. Unsurprisingly, this required ‘new’ academic and industry experts to produce comprehensive strategies for defending tourist infrastructure so that ‘we’ could continue to enjoy secure vacations all over the world. The discourse of ‘soft targets’ became a compelling way to make sense of those ‘out of the way’ places that are perfect for both holidaymakers and terrorists:

Holiday destinations such as the Philippines, Bali and Mombasa are soft targets, their porous borders enabling easy access for al Qaida operatives wanting to link up with local groups. Such places may be ‘paradise’ to tourists, but to the suicide bomber that word means something altogether different. This clash of meanings raises issues of globalisation that go beyond the war on terror (Foden, 2002).

The discourse of ‘soft targets’ served many purposes, but one of the most significant was convincing tourists that it was possible to order, control and police the deterritorialized borders bequeathed by globalization. Reassured that ‘our’ responses to terrorism were equally deterritorialized, pernicious, ubiquitous and lethal (i.e. we could identify and protect soft targets before they were targeted), tourists could continue to enjoy vacations around the world in destinations that were both exotic and safe.

There is, of course, much political work that is sequestered within the discourse of ‘soft targets’, especially in the way it seeks to reassure tourists about a destination’s security. The discourse reduces tourism and leisure’s vast labour force, its wealth generation, its cultural capital, its advertising and marketing campaigns, its increasingly comprehensive insurance arrangements and its ever-regenerating fantasy landscapes to objects of utility that can be calculated, assessed and evaluated for their level of vulnerability in the face of terrorism. But, this comprehensive subordination of the entire industry to a security calculus does not just curtail the exotic fantasies of tourists: it directs, orders and controls their physical movement – the possibilities of where they can and cannot move – by transforming the industry’s material infrastructure. Some of the most familiar examples of tourist infrastructure are the entrances, lobbies and public meeting areas of international hotels. Far from being pleasurable havens of leisure and relaxation, hotels have always been part of a security apparatus: think, for example, how hotels are requisitioned as troop barracks during war, or how they function as a ‘neutral’ space for peace negotiations and diplomacy. Indeed, hotels have always hosted the ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’ of tourists, diplomats, spies, protestors, labourers and vagabonds (Fregonese, 2012), but what makes the contemporary encounter between tourism and terrorism politically interesting is the way it has changed the material infrastructure of hotels – their entrance architecture, lobby designs, reception space, software technologies and security provisions (Wharton, 2001).

As a microcosm of the way in which cities and urban infrastructures have been transformed to achieve greater ‘resilience’ against terrorism, hotels have also been securitized so as to increase their status as safe enclaves (Brock and Walker, 2008; Clifton, 2012; Coaffee and Murikami Wood, 2006; Chan and Lam, forthcoming; Gunaratna, 2008; Mills et al., 2010; Morgan and Pritchard, 2005; Stratfor Global Intelligence, 2009). Similar to the ‘rings of steel’ employed in urban settings such as the City of London, hotels have increased their ‘perimeter security’ through large concrete blocks, manned security checkposts, automatic bollards and electronic barriers that increase the ‘standoff distance’ between the private space of the hotel and its public surroundings (Gunaratna, 2008; Clifton, 2012). These fortifications of hotel perimeter security have changed the spatial orientation of hotels towards their local environments, so that the material markers of luxury, hospitality and welcome (i.e. ‘please come and stay!’) are now overridden with numerous markers of security and surveillance that extend from these external perimeters all the way through the hotel’s ‘servicescape’ and into each guest room (Hilliard and Baloglu, 2008). Within this trajectory, perimeter security barriers, security guards, CCTV cameras and metal detectors located at the entrance to hotels prepare guests for the increased visible and invisible security measures within the hotel’s walls (e.g. even more CCTV cameras and security guards, data surveillance linked to check-in, automated keys and key-activated elevators, biometric door locks, increased background checks on employees, detailed evacuation plans, emergency lighting, bomb-proof Kevlar wallpaper and shatter-proof glass) (Clifton, 2012; Groenenboom and Jones, 2003; Gunaratna, 2008; Jungsun et al., 2008; Sim and Jevanathan, 2012; Smith, 2003; Sorrell, 2009). However, because hotels are now part of a wider preemptive network implementing pre-travel data surveillance and screening procedures, the securitization of hotel guests takes place well before they see the hotel’s front façade, walk into its lobby and become entangled within the building’s security matrix. This network forms part of the invisible architecture through which tourists staying in hotels are prepared in advance to become securitized subjects; indeed, they are already known as collections of data (Lyon, 2003; Morgan and Pritchard, 2005). ‘Real’ bodies – those made of blood and sinew – are also prepared through their affective encounters with previous security procedures. Travelling bodies have become so habituated to the security procedures used in airports (e.g. full-body scanners, body and bag searches) that they expect these procedures as part of their hotel experience (Feickert et al., 2006).

The discourse of ‘soft targets’ is limited in the way it understands the securitization of hotel space because it separates material causes (e.g. ‘vulnerable’ infrastructure) from human effects (e.g. insecure and threatened tourists) and insists that more precise calculations about the vulnerability of material infrastructure will translate into increased security for global travellers. Such a logic misses how securitization operates most powerfully in affective, biopolitical and everyday registers where human bodies and non-human materials (e.g. algorithms, security technologies, CCTV cameras) are thoroughly enmeshed. Human agents are not isolated from their material life-worlds – nor are the securitization processes seeking to protect them from terrorist attacks. Like the transformation of airport security, the intense securitization of hotel space in the wake of Bali and Mombasa used the exceptionality of the terrorist threat to disaggregate human subjects from material objects and diminish the shared agency of both by governing their mobility and reducing them to collections of data.

Watching each other: Risk management, privatization and counter-terrorism training

Like all processes that bring subjects, objects, spaces and futures into the orbit of the War on Terror, the securitization of the tourism industry is driven by a particular understanding of ‘risk management’. Critical scholars in international relations have demonstrated how calculations of risk are absolutely central to the War on Terror’s security apparatus: not only do they provide precise ways of identifying and measuring threats, they also promote the belief that through the management of risk, insecurity can be eradicated (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; De Goede, 2008; Salter, 2008). Tourism studies scholars and experts seeking to provide technical and managerial solutions to the vulnerability of the industry after Bali and Mombasa have shaped the ‘risk management’ strategies that proliferated in government, industry and commercial responses to the terrorist threat. As Reisinger and Mavondo (2005: 212) argue, ‘Tourism research must take up the challenge of risk assessment. If the tourism industry is going to be prosperous, then tourism researchers must make efforts to increase the industry’s understanding of risk perception’. The equation that drives this research is very simple: the more risky a hotel, resort or destination is perceived to be, the less tourism it will attract and the less profit it will generate. Thus, the job of researchers and experts is to provide detailed calculations to explain the risk–tourism relationship, as well as workable proposals to help solve the problem of high levels of risk within the industry. Thus, ‘risk assessment’ models identify how travellers perceive risk (e.g. whether they are risk-aware, risk-neutral or risk-averse) and map those risks onto consular warning sheets, travel advisories, global ‘risk maps’ and detailed ‘risk registers’ (Floyd and Pennington-Grey, 2004; Floyd et al., 2003; Lepp and Gibson, 2003; Reisiger and Mavondo, 2005; Sackett and Botteril, 2006; Wilks, 2006). Similarly, ‘risk management’ models aimed at decreasing perceptions of risk and increasing levels of tourism use historical examples of crisis and disaster management to show how destinations have coped, either successfully or unsuccessfully, with terrorist incidents and political violence (Blake and Sinclair, 2003; Faulkner, 2001; Glaesser, 2003; Prideaux, 2003; Ritchie, 2004). These examples are then used to propose ‘best practice’ solutions for how hotels, resorts, museums and tourist attractions should implement detailed strategies to help them identify potential risks in the future, recover quickly from disasters, and restore consumer confidence.

One of the common strategies that has emerged from the ‘risk management’ literature is the provision of counter-terrorism training for tourism employees, especially hotel workers. Regional responses to the Bali bomb began by coordinating the various ‘risk management’ procedures put in place by governments, policymakers, industry professionals and private companies, and proposed counter-terrorism training for the tourism industry in Bali (Robertson et al., 2006: 41–43). Similarly, in the UK, the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NCTSO), in conjunction with the Association of Chief Police Officers (a private company), published a comprehensive information document on the counter-terrorism measures to be implemented in hotels and restaurants (ACPO, 2008). This was folded into the CONTEST 2 strategy in March 2009 as the NCTSO began to provide ‘free workshops in all major towns and cities across the UK to show hoteliers how to plan, prepare, prevent and recover from a possible terrorist attack’ (Jamieson, 2010). Defending the provision of counter-terrorism training to such a vast labour force, then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith commented, ‘That’s not about snooping, that’s about the widest possible range of people helping to keep us safe in this country’ (cited in Percival, 2009). The largest programme for counter-terrorism and surveillance training within hotels is the online ‘Eye on Awareness: Hotel Security and Anti-Terrorism Training’ programme, developed by the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Institute (AHLEI) in collaboration with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (AHLEI, 2011a; Smith, 2003). This programme was designed to complement the DHS’s wider post-9/11 ‘If you see something, say something’ campaign, which was aimed at getting US citizens to report anything ‘suspicious’ to an official – a campaign that included its own dedicated section for hotel employees (Amoore, 2007; DHS, 2011; Marcuse, 2006). In both the DHS information video ‘No Reservations: Suspicious Behaviour in Hotels’ and the more substantial AHLEI training programme ‘Eye on Awareness’, hotel employees are trained to ‘See Something’ (recognize suspicious activity), ‘Say Something’ (report suspicious activity) and ‘Do Something’ (respond to crisis situations) (AHLEI, 2011b; DHS, 2011). As Mark Sanna, head of security at Hyatt Hotels and part of the team that developed the ‘Eye on Awareness’ programme explained:

Think of training in a different way – from the perspective of a terrorist. Terrorists train too … they run training camps to develop their skills, they produce manuals and guides, they hold webinars for their affiliated members. If they are putting so much effort into their training, can we afford to be doing any less? That’s the security training challenge we face (cited in AHLEI, 2011c).

The AHLEI programme works through both an imperative command issued to tourism employees (e.g. ‘Say Something’) and a threat (e.g. ‘can we afford to be doing any less?) that, together, imply a terrible consequence (i.e. a terrorist bomb) if proper training is not implemented.

These training programmes are one of the main vehicles through which the securitization process is distributed across the entire tourism infrastructure. They incorporate elite bodies from government, industry and commercial circles, as well the everyday work lives of diverse tourism workers who clean hotel rooms, check in guests, cook meals and do laundry. What is curious about these programmes is that the detailed business of making hotels and other tourist attractions ‘safe’ from terrorism has been comprehensively devolved to private security companies (PSCs). ² Although the AHLEI training programme was initially a government initiative, it was developed ‘in partnership’ with ‘senior global security officials’ from the tourism industry and employed the risk-management consulting firm Cardinal Point Strategies (AHLEI, 2011c). Alongside government initiatives, many PSCs work independently to set and regulate standards of hotel security. For example, Safehotels (2012), in conjunction with PSCs Pinkerton Consulting and Securitas, has developed the ‘Global Hotel Security Standard’, which provides auditing, training and certification programmes worldwide. Moreover, most major global PSCs like G4S and Securitas now have a branch or section dealing specifically with the leisure, hospitality and tourism industries. But, as Morgan and Pritchard (2005: 127) argue, ‘the relationship between tourism, private security and surveillance practices has received no attention in the literature despite the evident proliferation of private security companies’. This is an important site for future research, as the complex network of public and private actors implementing counter-terrorism training programmes in hotels and other tourism infrastructures works to multiply and extend the reach of liberal techniques of governance. Indeed, two large sections of the global labour force – PSCs and hotel employees – are now assimilated into a mode of governance in which their behaviour is both regulated by the overarching discourse of risk management and actively oriented towards activities such as vigilance, suspicion and surveillance (Amoore, 2007).

Securing future vacations

Using the events of Bali and Mombasa as a starting point to explore the securitization of the tourism industry in the War on Terror is not to suggest that these events were the origin of such practices, or that they represent its apotheosis. Indeed, the entanglements of tourism and terrorism have important precedents (e.g. Luxor in 1997) and have continued to intensify in the years following Bali and Mombasa (e.g. Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005, Bali in 2005, Yemen in 2007, Mumbai in 2010). What this article has argued is that the responses to Bali and Mombasa revealed an important expansion in the scope, invasiveness and ubiquity of securitization. To be sure, the securitization of the tourism industry is part of a wider logic in which publics are made increasingly fearful and passive – and thus more easily governed – by making the terrorist threat exceptional in its scope, irrationality and propensity for violence. What the counter-terrorism responses to Bali and Mombasa helped to reveal was the illiberal face of the prevailing liberal order – an order whose claims to global solidarity can only be sustained by effacing the inequalities between members (e.g. between privileged tourists and tourist workers); whose claims to inclusiveness and tolerance are belied by the violent actions it pursues against its ‘illiberal’ enemies (e.g. the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan); and whose claims to liberty and freedom are seriously compromised by the pernicious techniques of governance that mobilize our everyday lives in the War on Terror. This article has been an effort to show how the securitization of tourism after 9/11, Bali and Mombasa reproduced the liberal order, and to make the case that tourism should be included in our growing critical contestations of that order.

Taking tourism seriously as a site of securitization and governance is not just about applying a given critical framework to yet another hidden sphere in which the liberal order manifests itself. What makes tourism such a rich analytical site is that it forces us to ask some challenging questions about the future possibilities of work that interrogates the intersections of securitization, governance and international relations. First, the securitization of tourism brings us into productive conversations with scholars in international political economy who problematize the hegemony of neoliberalism. As the brief discussion of the counter-terrorism training programmes in hotels suggested, there are important questions to be asked here about the affective mobilization of an entire labour force and the public–private arrangements that implement such developments. Are there local variations on this sector-wide mobilization, or moments of dissent? Second, the securitization of tourism cannot be understood outside of the debates over critical infrastructure protection, resilience and urban security. Tourism infrastructure in cities may not be as ‘critical’ as sewage or water systems, but it is increasingly significant in terms of a city’s marketability, branding and economic resilience. How, then, do we account for the securitization of different kinds of tourism infrastructure, from famous urban attractions to enclave leisure resorts? Third, the changes to global tourism after 9/11 cannot be made sense of by simply tracking the rise and fall of visitor numbers or airport throughput. The securitization of tourism is never only about the implementation of policies or technologies: it is also about less tangible notions such as the economies of desire that encourage people into foreign travel, the geopolitical imaginaries that plot global destinations according to safety and danger, and the affective mobilizations of fear, anxiety and danger that circulate in particular destinations. So, how does the securitization of tourism operate in these less tangible registers, and how might we analyse such operations? While I welcome the unavoidably interdisciplinary range of these new avenues of research, I want to end by suggesting that critical work on securitization and governance in international relations and geography provides the best anchor for future work on the role of tourism within a global security landscape. No other intellectual space is able to foreground questions of power so clearly – its multiplicities, its fractures, its redistributions – when interrogating sites of everyday life that seem, at first, to be trivial.