Brand Management for Crisis: Tourism, Security, and Narrative Control in Post-Terror Contexts

Why do states use tourism campaigns to respond to terror attacks? Although much of the terrorism literature focuses on "hard" defense-based responses, states also need a way to combat perceptions of instability and undermined authority. I argue that "soft power" responses - those based in cultural imagery, emotion, or influence - are a vital political strategy in post-terror contexts. First, I build a model of when states use tourism as a post-attack policy: I conduct a series of logistic regressions to compare terrorist attacks with 10+ casualties between 2007-2017 (767 attacks in 47 countries, according to the UMD Global Terrorism Database (GTD)) to an original dataset of the timing and implementation of tourism campaigns. I then examine three cases to theorize their political purpose: a "typical implementation" of tourism policy (France after the 2015 Paris attacks); an "atypical lack" of tourism policy (the United States after the Las Vegas, San Bernardino, and Orlando attacks, 2015-2017); and an "atypical/extreme implementation" of tourism policy (the al-Assad regime's Ministry of Tourism during the Syrian Civil War). The results demonstrate that tourism is an increasingly common response to state crises, and is used to create an image of security - even if the reality remains highly insecure. Overall, this article demonstrates the renewed role of soft power, narrative control, and the manipulation of public emotion in today’s international system.