This article introduces a special issue that illustrates how violence and dispossession frequently define everyday practices, livelihoods and representations in tourism. The authors take a relational approach to violence, emphasizing how violence's many forms (physical, symbolic, epistemic, structural, etc.) interweave in practice to produce the built tourism environment, creating unequal power relations between “hosts” and “guests”. The special issue's papers provide five historically and geographically specific articulations of tourism, violence and dispossession in Paris, Guatemalan forests, rural Honduras, faux South African shantytowns, and O'ahu, Hawaii. They reveal recurring themes of enclosure and extraction, erasure and commodification, “destructive creation,” and (neo)colonialism. This introductory article draws on the special issue's guest editors’ ethnographic research in Colombia and Guatemala to elaborate on the key concepts of tourism development, violence, dispossession and spatial fetishism underpinning these themes using a critical and geographical approach. Attending to violence in tourism allows contributors to identify more sustainable forms of tourism development. These include redefining “sustainability” as Indigenous and Native sovereignty, advocating for grassroots and collective forms of tourism, reducing tourism's role in climate change by traveling locally, and contesting the reproduction of colonial itineraries and practices of “Othering”.

Across Latin America, non-traditional tourism sectors, like eco-tourism and cultural tourism, have grown dramatically in the last 30 years. Neoliberal ideologies, reforms, and infrastructure set the stage for growth, but neoliberalism alone does not explain why the tourism industry is an acute site of struggle over territory, identity and history. From Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve in the heart of Central America's “Mayan World” tourism initiative, this article asks: Why is contemporary tourism such a powerful and pervasive site of contentious socio-spatial politics? It argues that neoliberal reforms have combined with tourism's dual violent practices of spatial colonization and the commodification of place to fuel this growth and politicization. Spatial colonization refers to the commodification of “nature” and practices of land dispossession that define capitalism's expansion into “underdeveloped” and “green” spaces. The industry also commodifies the culture, identity and experience of a place and its people as objects of tourist consumption, which infuses tourism's representational practices with immense, yet subtle power. This article further illustrates how tourism landscapes are carved out of practices of material and intangible dispossession, as well as practices of state territorialization. This violence often engenders diverse forms of resistance by “hosts” living in other people's playgrounds around the world.

In March 2020, the United States government began a series of measures designed to dramatically restrict immigration as part of its response to the global health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This included Title 42, which deported asylum seekers immediately and prevented them from applying for asylum. These measures worsened an already precarious situation at the US–Mexico border for an estimated 60,000 asylum seekers who were prevented, by the Trump administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ (aka MPP) policy enacted in January 2019, from remaining in the United States while they awaited their asylum hearings. In-depth interviews, participant observation, and social media analysis with humanitarian and legal advocates for asylum seekers living in a camp at the border in Matamoros, Mexico reveal that COVID-19’s impacts are not limited to public health concerns. Rather, COVID-19’s impacts center on how the Trump administration weaponized the virus to indefinitely suspend the asylum system. We argue that the Matamoros refugee camp provides a strategic vantage point to understand the repercussions of state policies of exclusion on im/mobility and survival strategies for asylum seekers. Specifically, we use the analytical lenses of the politics of im/mobility, geographies of exclusion, and asylum seeker resilience to identify how COVID-19 has shaped the im/mobility and security of the camp and its residents in unexpected ways. At the same time, our research illustrates that camp residents exercise im/mobility as a form of political visibility to contest and ameliorate their precarity as they find themselves in conditions not of their choosing.

On frontiers dominated by illicit activities such as narcotrafficking, criminal organizations’ usurpation of land and resources is profoundly changing rural livelihoods and prospects for biodiversity conservation. Prior work has demonstrated how drug trafficking catalyzes forest loss and smallholder dispossession but does not make clear the extent to which the long-term control of land is moved from state, Indigenous, or smallholders to criminal or other actors. This study attempts to describe those shifts. Specifically: we develop a typology of land control, and use it to track how drug trafficking initiates shifts from public lands and Indigenous territories to private large holdings. We examine an array of secondary sources indicating shifts in land control related to narcotrafficking, including illegal land seizure documents, news media, and surveys of land managers. In absence of formal land registries, frontier actors may signal their control over land through land use change. After establishing where changes in land control have taken place, we analyzed land use and resulting changes in spatial patterns of forest loss. We found that large scale sustained forest losses (over 713,244 ha and 417,329 ha), in Guatemala and Honduras, respectively, from 2000–2019) corresponds with areas undergoing shifts in control towards large landowners, often related to narcotrafficking. Incomplete empirical data on land control prevent comprehensive attribution of all sustained forest loss related to narcotrafficking. Yet the limited evidence gathered here indicates drug trafficking activities initiate widespread and sustained shifts and consolidation of who controls land and resources at the frontier. Our work suggests that in Central America and likely elsewhere, control over land—quite separate from property rights—is the key factor in understanding social and ecological change.