In January 2013, Toshifumi Fujimoto acquired notoriety as a nonprofessional photographer and war tourist in Syria. He is not mentioned in Debbie Lisle’s book, although as a war tourist, Mr. Fujimoto could have appeared in a work analyzing the entanglements of war and tourism and elucidating what these entanglements look like exactly in different politico-historical constellations (for example, the British Empire, post–World War II, bipolarity, and the “War on Terror”). Indeed, Holidays in the Danger Zone shows that these entanglements are historically contingent; they differ across space and over time. Fujimoto’s place there would have been in the context of “dark tourism” or, in Lisle’s term, political tourism, that is, tourism encountering violent conflict (p. 199). That pastime may appear unusual, but as the book shows, it is not.

The author shows much more, of course. Given her record of earlier publications on the subject, Lisle is uniquely qualified to analyze the war–tourism entanglements and to integrate critical tourism studies firmly into the political analysis of war and violent conflict. She argues that “historically specific geopolitical architectures” (p. 181)—“reproduced by efforts to maintain security, order and justice” (p. 283)—have always shaped, and continue to shape, war and tourism. Luckily, though acknowledging that war and tourism join hands in (re-)producing “difference and domination” (p. 11) and claiming that “modes of domination [are] intrinsic to the practices of war and tourism” (p. 100), the book is not yet another exercise in Orientalism. Indeed, throughout it, Lisle avoids simplistic dichotomies such as colonizer–colonized. Carefully avoiding causal claims, she shows that war and tourism as social practices are interrelated, multidirectional, and complex—“entangled, complicit, and co-constitutive” (p. 178), “deeply entwined, enmeshed, and juxtaposed” (p. 195), and “in relation” (p. 285). Almost always, there is space for the articulation and the practice of dissent.

Applying a critique of reductive understandings of cycles of peace, war, and tourism, Lisle proceeds by developing a critical methodology with which to unravel the war–tourism entanglements. For example, the neat separation of war and peace does not make much analytical sense: Violent conflict does not necessarily stop tourism. The author’s methodology connects with one another the study of visuality, materiality, and social practice. While briefly referring to the work of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, she subsequently presents a more thorough critique of the existing literature when, for example, engaging with John Lennon and Malcolm Foley’s work on dark tourism (pp. 194–95). Crucially, the book shows that tourism always is political: Tourism “is structured by antagonistic geopolitical forces” (p. 10) that it helps reproduce, and violent military campaigns always include elements of leisure, following and replicating a preexisting tourist sensibility. War and tourism cultivate specific ways of seeing foreign Others, derived from historical, especially colonial, experiences. Nowadays, these ways of seeing are deeply embedded in the liberal order that they help stabilize.

Among the book’s many subjects, two “crossover practices” stand out: “when soldiers become tourists, and when tourists enter war zones” (p. 25). With regard to the first practice, Lisle meticulously analyzes over time the U.S. military “Rest and Relaxation” (R+R) procedures. She shows not only that off-duty soldiers display and reproduce typical tourist behavior but also that they have to navigate between different subject positions assigned to Others, dependent on whether these Others are encountered on the battlefield or in R+R holiday resorts. Furthermore, social practices change in accordance with the specific historical constellations within which the military operates. For example, the policy of no fraternization and the soldiers’ confinement to military bases in recent wars, in tandem with digitized forms of communication and image production, have profound effects on the way that soldiers experience, or fail to experience, Others.

With regard to the first practice—when tourists enter war zones—Lisle explores “dark tourism” but also sites of commemoration, designed for tourist purposes. Her discussions of commemorative practices in South Africa and Northern Ireland are particularly illustrative of the ways in which she would like these practices to be orchestrated: as encounters “ultimately leav[ing] visitors with more questions, anxieties, and curiosities than certainties” (p. 229) or as “nonmuseum[s]” (p. 231) offering creative space for the (re)negotiation of different views rather than demanding acceptance of an authoritatively presented, official view. With regard to dark tourism, further differentiation among traditional photojournalists, citizen photographers, and independent, nonprofessional photographers would have helped illuminate the current politics of image production in war zones, including the photographic construction of (degrees of) Otherness.

One of the most important aspect of the book is Lisle’s constant search for “unruly, ambiguous, and provocative counterconducts” (p. 31), that is, social practices that ignore or escape from the very hierarchical order within which they operate and which they are supposed to confirm. Indeed, “unruly moments that question and disrupt dominant geopolitical imaginaries often occur when and where we least expect them” (p. 25). For example, Lisle’s rereading of photographs produced by the Naval Aviation Photography Unit (NAPU) reveals that what was intended primarily as a propaganda tool supporting the U.S. war effort in the Pacific inadvertently undermines, when read critically, the very cultural conventions it purported to propagate, including values attached to the core family and heteronormativity. The only space where such counterconduct cannot be found in this book is the area of militarized prostitution, discussed throughout as one of the most pernicious entanglements of war and tourism.

Some readers may be troubled by the author’s rather unquestioned insistence on ambivalence and heterogeneity as guiding principles for academic work. For example, Lisle’s demand for “opportunities for counterconduct and oppositional interpretation” (p. 135) in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum may strike readers as insensitive. While I sympathize with her overall approach to the politics of memory, this particular museum may not be the most suitable place to acknowledge “the complexities and crossovers that characterize any experience of conflict” (p. 133). Likewise, Lisle’s critique of the insistence on reconciliation in postconflict situations may strike readers as odd. It is, however, compelling in light of her insistence on interpretative openness. Her critique of selected humanitarian activists whose work “reproduce[s] a tourist sensibility that is itself part of the very militarization [it] oppose[s]” (p. 282) follows stringently from her preceding analysis.

Occasionally, the author glosses over some of the analytical concepts that seem to inform her analysis of visual source material. For example, her critique of aestheticization (pp. 112, 154) is not derived from a thorough reading of the quite substantial literature on this subject. Readers may be irritated by occasional errors: Clausewitz appears as “Clauswitz” (p. 9), Janina Struk as “Joanna Struk” (pp. 78, 365), and Michael J. Shapiro as “Gary Shapiro” (p. 362). The author also acknowledges both the absence of “the return gaze” (p. 293) and an overall UK/U.S./Western bias. Finally, the politics of spectatorship is more complex than Holidays in the Danger Zone suggests: Spectators may be neither soldiers nor tourists, but they may nevertheless be implicated in the entanglements of war and tourism in diverse and ambivalent ways. However, these are minor omissions in a timely, compelling, and important study that shows how structures of difference and domination, enmity, and Otherness shape both war and tourism; war and tourism, in turn, reproduce these very structures.