Tourism and World Peace

With wars raging in Sudan, Ukraine and the Middle East it is not surprising that the UN has chosen Peace as the theme for World Tourism Day this year (Friday 27 September).To mark the day, I brought together Paige McClanahan, author of The New Tourist, and Aziz Abu Sarah and Scott Cooper of Medji Tours to discuss whether or not tourism contributes to peace, and if it can, to suggest how it could make a bigger contribution.

We all make choices about how we travel, and about the tours and opportunities that we provide for our clients and guests. Mejdi aspires to provide opportunities for travellers to act as “citizen diplomats” and challenge our industry to do more.

“Over a billion people travel internationally every year. If the industry were to realise the potential for travel as an act of peace, travel could change the world. Peacemaking can’t be left to diplomats, nonprofits, and academics. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t last. …. The world needs citizen diplomats to engage and learn, to create friendships, and then spread those stories.”

Mejdi are global leaders in socially conscious travel. Mejdi means to honour in Arabic “that is exactly what we do on every tour – we honour the people of the place.”

Over 1.5 million people have now viewed Aziz Abu Sarah’s Ted Talk from March 2025. Take 5 minutes to watch and listen.  For more tolerance, we need more … tourism?

Aziz also reads this poem to us

Other voices arguing that travel can break down borders include:

Mark Twain: In  Roughing It, a prequel to An Innocent Abroad he recounts adventures on a stagecoach journey west with his brother. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Jost Krippendorf, in his seminal text The Holiday Makers, reminded us that “every individual tourist builds up, or destroys human values while travelling”. 

The International Institute for Peace through Tourism, the IIPT, has been making the case since it was founded in 1986. Its vision is for travel and tourism to become the world’s first global peace industry, founded on the belief that every traveller is potentially an “Ambassador for Peace.”