Making waves: Peace Boat Japan as a model of sustainable peace through tourism

Linking peace to tourism has led to key questions in the academic literature. Is tourism a generator of peace or simply its beneficiary? Can tourism be a social force or is it merely an industry? What kind of pedagogical principles can tourism utilise to promote learning for peace? This article offers a case study of Peace Boat, a Japan-based non-government organisation that contributes to human rights literacy and peace to reflect on some of these critical questions. It is based on a qualitative and collaborative research partnership that harnesses the power of stories of peace encounters to better understand the practices, pedagogies and potentials of peace tourism. We argue that when we utilise peace studies’ concepts such as “positive and negative peace” and “peace with justice”, we illuminate how dialogue in contested spaces is core to peace through tourism approaches. This study reveals a radical pedagogy and enables a more reflexive approach to reclaiming tourism in the interests of securing sustainability, human rights, justice and peace. In analysing the work of Peace Boat through its global voyages, we show how it fosters global solidarity, providing evidence that tourism can indeed contribute to sowing the seeds for global peace.