Touristic Zoopolitics: Colonial Capitalist Zoopolitics and Touristic Governance

While the global tourism system has immense governing power, how it governs and with what effects and consequences still needs theoretical development. This article theorises and interrogates how Western colonial capitalist zoopolitics – that is, the entangled politics of (de)valorisation and (de)humanisation – shape the Western tourism system and how it governs subjects and spaces. In so doing, the article makes two key contributions to critical theorisations of how tourism governs (‘touristic governance’): first, it identifies ‘touristic zoopolitics’, demonstrating how the Western tourism system governs through political processes of (de)valorisation and (de)humanisation and, second, it maps and theorises how zoopolitical touristic governance produces and orders variously (de)valorised and (de)humanised subjects and spaces into a complex zoopolitical geography. This analytic deepens and broadens understandings of how coloniality operates within and through the Western tourism system. Ultimately, the article argues that touristic zoopolitics are constituted by, and help sustain, the Western colonial capitalist order.