"The Political Economy of New Tourism Mobilities in the MENA Region", Third Word Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) - Barcelona, 19-24 July 2010 

The journal Mobilities states that contemporary "mobilities encompasse both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life. Recent developments in transportation and communications infrastructures, along with new social and cultural practices of mobility have elicited a number of new research initiatives for understanding the connections between these diverse mobilities."

In the last ten years new trends and dynamics of tourism mobilities in the MENA region have been noticed: the boom of intra-regional tourisms, the dramatic increase in intra-regional FDI in tourism services, neo-liberal urban restructuring of tourism places and spaces, the establishment of various new intraregional transportation infrastructure and so on. While numerous trends have been driven by decisions taken at the political level, others express growing profit-oriented investments strategies. For example the Libyan investments in Tunisia and Egypt are seen as result of the new political orientation of the country.

Beyond investments, the visa-issuing policies and the establishment of new transportation infrastructures reflect new strategies of tourism regulatory frameworks that need to be examined. For example, on the one hand, Iranians cannot travel to Egypt and Jordan due to visa restrictions, but they are more than welcome in the UAE, Syria and Iraq. Turkey and Lebanon have established a no-visa regime for visitors from GCC countries and Jordan.

Furthermore, new developments in communications have also elicited new intraregional connections between both migrants and tourists within and outside the MENA region. Such connections are, of course, emphatically gendered as well as structured by different ethnic backgrounds and shared heritages. These heritages bring to the fore the material nature of many tourism mobilities in terms of the movement of everyday things that become important to sustain the political economy of tourism.

This panel, thus, aims to discuss from a political economy perspective the various new tourism mobilities in the MENA region and seeks submissions that take up the above dimensions in order to explore the diverse economic, communicational, material and migrational experiences of tourism mobilities.

For participation please send a short abstract of 300 words per email to the organizers:
- Dr. Ala Al-Hamarneh - University of Mainz - Germany, a.al-hamarneh@geo.uni-mainz.de
- Professor Kevin Hannam - University of Sunderland - UK, Kevin.hannam@sunderland.ac.uk
- Professor Marcus Stephenson - Middlesex University Dubai - UAE, m.stephenson@mdx.ac