Sanctions, Tourism, and Resilience

This timely and significant book examines how sanctions reshape the landscape of global tourism and how destinations subjected to these measures respond to isolation, economic strain, and stigma. Tourism is often imagined as a borderless industry, yet it remains deeply shaped by international politics. Sanctions expose this reality by disrupting flows of visitors, capital, and knowledge, forcing destinations to rethink their survival within a constrained global order.

The book investigates the strategies through which sanctioned destinations endure, adapt, and sometimes transform, highlighting the coping mechanisms, innovations, and long-term adjustments that enable them to sustain functionality and competitiveness within the global tourism market. By centering resilience, the book shifts the narrative from the impacts of sanctions to the responses and solutions, offering a novel perspective on how tourism systems operate under geopolitical constraints. This is supported with a wide range of comparative case studies of countries with long-standing and recent sanctions experiences with diverse experiences of sanctions.

This significant volume is of interest to policy makers, practitioners, destination management and marketing organizations, and students of crisis and politics who seek to understand how tourism endures amid geopolitical tension, and how resilience itself becomes a space of creativity, negotiation, and survival.

Siamak Seyfi is an Associate Professor in the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research investigates the political and spatial dimensions of tourism, paying particular attention to questions of resilience, sustainability, and the ways tourism is entangled with geopolitics, especially within the MENA region.

Rasoul Afsari is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning whose research focuses on urban resilience, tourism planning, and sustainable urban development. He has published widely on the ways cities respond to crises and long-term pressures, with particular interest in how planning frameworks can support more adaptive, equitable, and sustainable urban futures.

Ali Hosseini is an Associate Professor of urban geography in the Department of Human Geography and Planning at the University of Tehran, Iran. His research interests span policy analysis, spatial inequality, and tourism planning, with expertise in both quantitative and qualitative methods.