The international politics of tourism : contact zones in Cairo

• Main Author: Wynne-Hughes, Elisa
• Published: University of Bristol 2013
• Subjects: 338.4791096216
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.616639

This thesis studies how Western tourism practices produce international subjects and the relations between them, asking what this tells us about contemporary international governance. To do so, I used ethnography and discourse analytic methods to examine how practices in four Western tourism contact zones in Cairo reproduce discourses, or systems of meaning, and corresponding subject positions. This research is located within and contributes to IR literature - specifically governmentality and postcolonial approaches - that assume international subjects are socially constituted and positioned in relation to each other through discursive practices. It underscores the constitutive power of tourism practices generally ignored by mainstream IR analyses, and highlights how international governance is not only something imposed but is also reproduced by subjects through multiple everyday practices. Each chapter analyzes a specific configuration of Western tourist and Egyptian subject positions in the contact zones of the Pyramids of Giza, Khan al Khalili market, Garbage City and Tahrir Square, including horse/ camel/ carriage drivers, salespeople, Garbage City residents, and revolutionaries, respectively. Overall I found that Western tourism practices function to define tourists as good international neoliberal subjects in relation to Egyptian 'others'. The positioning of these subjects is decontextualized and depoliticized, obscuring alternative interpretations of their practices. Without a context, these subject positions reinforce neoliberal rationalities by naturalizing a linear narrative of development, international (consumer) culture, market-based development initiatives, and neoliberal notions of freedom/justice/ democracy. At the same . time, these subject positions conceal and reproduce the articulation between Western tourism and transnational neoliberal practices that physically and economically privilege neoliberal subjects (Western tourists and Western/Egyptian elites) while excluding 'others' (those traditionally marginalized in Egyptian society). In this way, Western tourism functions as a technology of governance to propagate neoliberal logics internationally. This thesis opens space to repoliticize and contest the unequal and exclusionary international relations between subjects required by neoliberalism.