CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Cumberlidge, Freya |
|---|---|
| Title | (Still) Telling War Stories: How Bosnian and Herzegovinian Tour Guides Use 'War Tours' to Contest Understandings of the 1992-5 Conflict |
| Summary | This thesis explores how Bosnian and Herzegovinian tour guides utilise so-called ‘war tours’ to contest international understandings of the 1992-5 conflict. It considers these tour guides as knowledge making experts regarding the conflict, asking how International Relations might learn from their practice. In doing so it explores tourism as a unique site of quotidian knowledge making between the international and the local, suggesting that IR should use it to expand its registers of readable knowledge. The thesis focuses on the more experiential, embodied and affectual nature of knowledge produced within the tourscape to consider what knowledge this might generate that academia may not. To study this phenomenon, the thesis adopted an ethnographic approach, walking with the guides along their routes to understand their practices in situ. This ethnographic element, it was argued, is core to understanding the tours as they are so rooted in the embodied and the experiential. With focus resting on how exactly tour guides used their tours as knowledge making spaces, attention was directed more towards the processes of knowledge making than the actual content of the tours, to look at the myriad of strategies guides may use to make knowledge between themselves and participants. As is shown across the thesis, whilst knowledge making is in no ways guaranteed, given certain approaches and attunings from guide and participant alike, this knowledge making may happen. Thus, the work concludes that BiHian war tours should be read as spaces of knowledge making by scholars of International Relations. |
| Supervisor | Kurowska, Xymena |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/cumberlidge_freya.pdf |
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