Contribution short abstract

This paper explores how accumulation by securitization functions in tourism, reflecting on longstanding research in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. It proposes four key processes through which accumulation by securitization unfolds and prospects for alternative touristic development pathways.

Contribution long abstract

A growing body of research has revealed a trend toward the securitization of conservation in the past several decades worldwide and explored the forms of accumulation enabled by such securitization. This article builds on the idea of accumulation by securitization in conservation to explore specifically how tourism enables and even drives this process. We examine more than 25 years of world heritage and global biodiversity conservation in the Maya Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala to identify four types of accumulation by securitization through tourism in a globally prized conservation area. These include: 1) accumulation by securitization of territory, 2) touristic securitization of heritage, patrimony and culture, 3) accumulation by securitization through ‘sustainable development,’ and 4) practices of touristic securitization that “fix” identities and produce vulnerable and threatening subjects. Each of these forms of securitization provide an additional frontier for accumulation related to tourism, with clear implications for spatial relations, mobility, resource management, heritage claims, and relations of governance. Drawn from more than ten years of combined ethnographic and collaborative research in northern Guatemala and building from literatures across tourism studies, security studies, and political ecology, this article ultimately suggests that tourism in many cases may depend on accumulation by securitization, which then plays a key role in further processes of tourism expansion. We contend that this analytic may be useful to explain -- and perhaps help counter -- observed dispossession, violence, and exclusion related to touristic development.