Brexit–threat or opportunity? Resilience and tourism in Britain’s Island Territories

Abstract

As a catalyst of both change and complexity, Brexit prompts a re-think on the common focus in island studies on boundaries, borders and dichotomies of core–periphery that unsettle/disrupt static tropes of island insularity and dependence. Framed within the relational turn in island studies, this paper conceptualises resilience as a ‘new political reality’ in the broader geopolitical context of Brexit and tourism-dependent island environments. The sheer complexity of Brexit processes and outcomes necessitate a different way of thinking about resilience as a post-liberal episteme that actively responds to complex life. Research findings show, rather than being a barrier to change complexity presents new opportunities for island tourism engagement and self-organising adaptivity. The implications of which reflect the growing enrolment of tourism in international and domestic relations through an understanding of tourism as a geopolitical practice in the broader discourses of nation building and territorialization. Brexit affects the United Kingdom’s 14 Overseas Territories (OTs), most of which are islands, on a number of fronts including trade, security, access, mobility, identity and tourism. Methodology using primary and secondary literature, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic case study of Pitcairn Island advance the notion ‘revisionary core–periphery’ to positively foreground resilience as an active force and, in turn examine resilience actions that stem from preparedness (or not) in this relationship. Britain’s OTs’ in negotiating the Brexit machinery show an ability to transform diplomatic practices through rapid response and engagement that counters the limiting of dependency threatened by political decisions of their parent state. This creates a discursive shift from the mantra of small island vulnerability while the Pitcairn Island case study expands the idea of tourism as an agent of resilience through economic diversity and core–periphery realignment.