Abstract
Tourism is not merely a capitalist practice but a central practice through
which capitalism sustains itself. Precisely how tourism “products” become
capital and the types of violence this process entails, however, has not yet
been systematically theorized or investigated. Building on Noel Castree’s
six principles of commodification, we explore how tourism becomes
capital, understood as “value in motion”, and how this process not only
provokes various forms of material violence but can become a form of
(structural) violence in its own right. Based on research in tourism settings
in Southern Africa and Latin America and general trends in international
tourism, we argue that three integrated forms of structural violence to
both humans and non-human natures are especially prominent, namely
the systematic production of inequalities, waste and “spaces of exception”.
As a global industry crucially dependent on integrated material and
discursive forms of value creation, we also show that these forms of
structural violence are often rendered invisible through branding. We
conclude that tourism uniquely combines these three forms of structural
violence to enable a move from Schumpeter’s famous creative destruction
to “destructive creation” as a key form of violence under capitalism.