W Warfare tourism Raynald Harvey Lemelin 1 and Geoffrey R. Bird 2 1 School of Outdoor Recreation, Parks and Tourism, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada 2 School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada Warfare tourism incorporates battlefields, war museums, battleships, aerial display of vintage war planes, prisoner of war, internment and con- centration camps, sites of atrocities, peaceparks, battle re-enactments, and battlefield tours. Expe- rientially, warfare tourism involves the ▶ symbol- ism and meaning of military hardware, and/or acting or performing using military uniforms and materials. Ideally these experiences should pro- vide opportunities for the living to learn from the past, commemorate, mourn, and heal. Some of these activities like visiting a war museum do not require an in-situ experience. Although MacCannell (1976) was one of the first scholars to document the appeal of war-related attractions, it is important to note that monuments and memorials associated with wars and sites of atrocities have long dominated landscapes and attracted people for hundreds of years. Warfare tourism has been linked to disso- nant ▶ heritage (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996), thanatourism (Seaton 2009) and ▶ dark tourism (Lennon and Foley 2000). Today, historical re-enactments at Gettysburg and Hastings, visits to sites of war atrocity such as in ▶ Rwanda and Nanjing in ▶ China, Pearl Harbor in the ▶ United States, Flanders Field in ▶ Belgium, Gallipoli in ▶ Turkey , the Normandy beaches in ▶ France, and the annual War and Peace Show in Kent, ▶ United Kingdom, attract millions of tourists around the globe (Butler and Suntikul 2013). As research on warfare tourism evolves, so do different perspectives regarding ▶ management approaches, and thematic emphasis on motiva- tions to visit specific destinations. Research themes in this area include ▶ identity , the evolu- tion, and transformations of warscapes into memoryscapes, peaceparks as war attractions, dis- sonance, commercialism, managing the aura of death (Seaton 2009), and interpreting contested sites of conflict. Another area for ▶ future research is the role that tourism plays in contem- porary understandings of war ▶ history and cul- tural memory. Examining tourists as engaging in acts of remembrance and the extent to which tourism is an agent of remembrance are other areas of research. See also ▶ Cultural tourism, ▶ dark tourism, ▶ heritage, ▶ historical tourism. References Butler R., and W. Suntikul 2013 Tourism and War. New York: Routledge. # Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 J. Jafari, H. Xiao (eds.), Encyclopedia of Tourism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01384-8