Notwithstanding its size and importance in a globalized world, there is little systematic information about the volume and direction of human travel that considers both migration and other kinds of mobility. This article introduces new estimates of the volume of migratory and non-migratory human travel across country borders worldwide between 1995 and 2022. Building on pioneering work by Recchi et al. (2019, Estimating Transnational Human Mobility on a Global Scale), the estimates integrate information from three major sources: tourism data, air passenger data, and migration data. Our estimates reveal that total transnational mobility increased from 5.29 billion trips in 1995 to 10.66 billion in 2019, largely outpacing global population growth and telling a story of continued globalization in that period—or, more precisely, of regional integration, since four out of five cross-border travels occur within the same world region. Across the board, migration (i.e., travel followed by residence change) constitutes a tiny and decreasing fraction of international travel; less than 1% worldwide and as low as .12% in Europe. Amidst the sustained growth in volume, the global network of human cross-border mobility has experienced slow “tectonic shifts” in some of its major clusters, while maintaining a stable configuration in others.

This article investigates the shifting meanings of three Balinese socialist realist dance pieces created between 1957 and 1962 that portray fishermen, weavers, and farmers. Based on interviews with performers and analysis of scholarship, ethnographic material, and performances, this article reveals remarkable ironies resonating between the dances’ political origins during the Indonesian Communist Party’s rapid growth and how they have been repurposed since the 1970s to support New Order ideologies and capitalist uses like tourism. The additional use of these dances today in supporting environmental sustainability raises questions about their potential to reclaim aspects of activist intent.

Positioning Indian and Iranian elite tourists to the Tokugawa pilgrimage town of Nikko in relation to their European and American counterparts, this article shows how Meiji-era modern hotels served as mechanisms for an informal and amateur mode of learning about Japanese culture. What enabled Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan, Maharajah Jagatjit Singh, Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, and Ali Asghar Khan to visit the inland shrine town was its integration into the modern tourist infrastructure of the Meiji period by way of the rail connection to Tokyo; the construction of the Kanaya Hotel; and the availability of guides and guidebooks. Consequently, Nikko—and the Kanaya Hotel in particular—functioned as venues for pioneering Indian and Middle Eastern encounters with ‘authentic’ Japanese culture, subsequently published in Urdu and Persian. Japan’s ties to a global tourist system of hotels, restaurants, guides, guidebooks, postcards, photographs, and souvenirs thus contributed not only to Euro-American Japonisme, but also to nascent Indian and Middle Eastern appreciations of Japanese culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic and consequent global travel restrictions created an unprecedented crisis for the tourism industry. Considering that tourism generates about one fifth of the Croatian, the COVID-19 crisis posed a threat not only to companies in tourism, but also to the Croatian economy as a whole. This article examines the interplay of public and private institutions whose aim was to support resilience in tourism and prevent negative spill overs to other sectors. The regional Civil Protection Headquarters and a large hospitality company were analyzed as a part of the resilience assessments. Although both institutions have shown a high level of agility and resilience in their crisis management, this article outlines the deep societal interdependence between the public and private sector in times of global crisis.

The economic valuation of recreational ecosystem services is challenging due to difficulties in obtaining geo-tagged information of users. The objective of this study is to validate crowdsourced and user-generated content in order to predict visitation patterns to 16 national parks in Spain. The results may serve to encourage its utilization in the study of recreational demand in other countries, particularly developing countries, where on-site visitor information may be limited or expensive to gather. The present article employs a negative binomial regression model to evaluate the validity of two sources of data: Flickr and mobile phones. The accuracy of predictions exhibited variation across the 16 parks, indicating that site-specific characteristics, such as the seasonality of visitation patterns, may be of significance. The utilization of mobile phone data for modelling visitors yielded enhanced predictive capacity, as shown by the goodness of fit of the estimated models.

There is limited analysis of the adoption of luxury tourism strategies in Africa. Such strategies promise lower ecological impact and higher tourism revenues. Through an analysis of economic data and secondary literature, as well as interviews conducted in Mauritius, Botswana, and Rwanda, this article examines why once luxury tourism strategies are adopted and do not deliver expected results, some countries reverse these strategies while others do not. Contrary to recent African political economy literature, this paper shows that “democratic” governments (Mauritius, Botswana) with shorter-term horizons have more flexibility in adapting their strategies compared to “authoritarian” governments with longer-term horizons (Rwanda).

Since the 1950s, Catalonia has remained one of Europe’s most popular tourism destinations. Throughout this period, however, Catalonia’s presentation to the world has changed dramatically. In this article, I explore claims to authenticity in Catalan tourism attractions and promotion, which emerged as shrewd marketing language in the increasingly competitive tourism market of the 1980s and 1990s. The resulting Catalanisation of the region conditioned the international projection and reception of the region as historically, linguistically, culturally, and politically different from Spain and, indeed, the rest of the world. This new image of the region relied on and sustained an ontology of marketable and consumable national difference that resonates far beyond Catalonia’s borders. This research shows how ideas of consumable authenticity functioned as an important mediator between nationalism and globalisation, popularised nationalist thinking without the influence of committed nationalist actors, and helped scholars to understand the sustained importance of the nation-state as a unit of international politics despite its shifting meaning, function, and power from the 1970s to today.

This article argues that sexualized travel was a crucial site in which the ambivalences of the so-called sexual revolution were negotiated. Focusing on the experiences of white, West German men between the late 1960s and early 1990s, this article draws on a wide range of travel literature—as well as criticism of sex and travel—to document the ways in which tourists made sense of sexual ambivalences at home through discussions about sex abroad. Regardless of sexual orientation, white, West German men drew on overlapping languages of racialized desire to describe perceived pleasures abroad, revealing that race and racism are inextricable from the history of the sexual revolution in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The notion of infrastructure has recently featured prominently in international legal scholarship. The ambition behind the turn to infrastructure in international legal theory is comparable to other large attempts to conceptualize the discipline. Yet, against the backdrop of work in the humanities and social sciences, theoretical engagement with infrastructure is still nascent in the legal discipline. In this Article, we build on another recent development in international legal scholarship—the turn to “materiality”—to articulate a systematic theory of infrastructure in international law. At the center of our study is the case study of the cruise ship. Studying cruise ships and their legal and political environment in detail, we introduce three conceptual building blocks through which we develop a more comprehensive theory of infrastructure: Platform, object and rupture. Although we focus on cruise ships, the theory of legal infrastructure that we offer is applicable to a wide array of industries and issues.

Whenever a person intends to cross a border, citizenship de facto determines—more than any other status—whether that person can enter the territory of another state. Yet, despite its ubiquity and centrality within global mobility infrastructures, the exact mechanisms through which citizenship shapes human movement on the planetary scale remain surprisingly ambiguous. This Article examines the multifaceted ways in which citizenship operates as an organizing principle within the complex of rules and norms governing transnational human mobility, including how the increasing acceptance of dual nationality status and the emergence of citizenship-by-investment schemes reverberate throughout the legal infrastructure and create new pathways for elite mobility. Using citizenship as an exploratory lens, the Article thereby seeks to theoretically complement and nuance existing scholarship in migration and mobility studies, arguing that physical space remains the dominant structure for human mobility. As we show, legal infrastructures reconfigure access to human mobility in ways that simultaneously fragment and compress physical space as it pertains to transnational movement.

Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems, covering less than 1% of the continent, are under increasing anthropogenic threats, particularly from climate change and tourism. This study focuses on the impact of human trampling on soil microbial communities in Barrientos Island (South Shetlands archipelago), a frequently visited location. Soil samples were collected within and at the edge of two established paths representing varying levels of human disturbance. Physical and chemical analyses revealed significant differences between the paths, potentially creating anaerobic conditions favorable for specific microbial taxa. Thus, microbial communities also differed between the paths. Aerobic heterotrophic taxa were dominant in the less disturbed path, while anaerobic taxa such as Bacteroidetes vadinHA17 thrived in the more compacted path. Although alpha diversity indices did not differ, beta diversity analyses showed notable distinctions, particularly between the paths rather than trampled and untrampled areas. These findings suggest that microbial communities may recover following the stop of human activity, but also that indigenous microbial communities or other overlooked factors may be influencing the recovery potential. This study thus offers a starting point for similar research, as it highlights the need for further investigation to determine whether human trampling or other environmental factors are primarily responsible for these differences.