Understanding Anti-Arab Tourist Sentiment in Baku CAP Paper 216, January 2019
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Urban Tourism and a Culture Clash: Understanding Anti-Arab Tourist Sentiment in Baku CAP Paper 216, January 2019 Sahib Jafarov is a policy researcher focusing on Islam, prices, increasing inequality and decreasing inclusiveness in Ba- ethnic and religious conflicts, social movements, ku’s downtown and districts. So- bifurcated ethnicities, and urbanization in Azerbaijan. cial concerns also include rising Sahib has been a leading research fellow at the Center levels of prostitution; the grow- for Strategic Studies (CSS) in Baku since 2011, managing ing prominence of and demand for the Arabic language in service projects on marginalized groups. He is also the lead sectors as well as in public an- researcher and author of policy reports on religious nouncements; and the encroach- radicalism in Azerbaijan, divided ethnicities, and other ment of religious sectarianism, which threatens the religious bal- compelling topics. He holds an MA in Public Policy ance in the country. A question from King’s College, London (2015); an MA in National examining Baku residents’ pref- Security from Baku State University, Azerbaijan (2010); erences for tourists from differ- and a BA in Political Science from the Academy of Public ent regions found that the most favored tourists were Europeans Administration, Azerbaijan (2003). (65 percent in favor), Turks (45.8 ollowing the fall in the global and has done its best to cater to percent), and Russians (44.6 per- oil price and the economic them, launching five-star hotels, cent), while the view of Arab tour- Fcrisis in Azerbaijan in 2015, shopping malls, leisure centers, ists was the most negative (91.5 the government turned to tourism restaurants, entertainment, and percent against) (see below). to fill the economic gap, loos- therapy centers across the city. ening visa restrictions for some However, it has expended less This paper explores the cultural Arab countries and welcoming effort on mitigating the cultural and ideological similarities that wealthy Arab investors into its impact of the phenomenon, might unify Arabs and Azerbai- tourism, business, and real estate namely the culture clash between janis, as well as the differences markets. The capital city, Baku, Baku residents and Arab tourists. that produce rifts between them. and its leisure attractions have To do so, it examines Baku resi- become popular among tourists Residents of Baku have large- dents’ attitudes toward Arab tour- from Arab countries. Although ly responded negatively to this ists and businesses, as well as ex- Arabs make up only 10 percent new tourist wave, expressing ploring their causal mechanisms of all tourists visiting Azerbaijan, their dissatisfaction on social net- and outcomes. In the final sec- their numbers have increased works and in public spaces. The tion, it makes policy suggestions dramatically in recent years, economic impact of this tour- for curbing tensions between from around 9,000 in 2015 to ism is indeed marked by a lack the groups while fostering en- nearly 260,000 in 2017.1 The of transparency in property and gagement that will allow Baku to government well understands land sales to Arab buyers, which succeed in its tourism branding. what appeals to these visitors significantly drives up property Failing to integrate essential el- CAP Fellows Paper 216 1 ements of local identity into the In order to understand how in- married, and nearly half of them plans for developing Baku as a teractions between tourists and had undertaken post-secondary tourist destination limits long- locals affect the perceptions and education. The inferential statis- term development, social cohe- attitudes of Baku’s population, tical analysis tested how gender, sion, equality, and the city’s inclu- I employ a three-fold method: age, and educational level influ- sive and sustainable development content analysis of news media, ence people’s perceptions of Arab of services and infrastructure. a systematic random sampling tourists. I employed an indepen- survey, and in-depth interviews dent samples T-test, Pearson’s Methods with Baku residents. I use Con- Chi-squared tests, and Pearson tent Analysis (CA) to examine the Correlation analyses in the test- Pizam and Milman describe tour- discourse of online local and na- ing hypothesis. ism as a social, cultural, and eco- tional news media in August and nomic phenomenon that has a September 2018. In particular, I Last but not least, I conducted significant impact on public and focus on discourse among public 20 pre-survey and post-survey individual behaviors, moral sys- institutional and non-institution- in-depth interviews to help elu- tems, collective routines, tradi- al actors regarding ethnic and cidate the reasons for social op- tions, ceremony habits, and in- religious values, mores, and per- position to Arab tourists. These 2 stitutional forms. This process, ceptions. This allows me to draw semi-structured in-depth inter- however, does not just happen inferences about Arab social and views were conducted with resi- when tourists appear in a desti- cultural influence (see Appendix dents of Baku in May and October nation; it depends to some degree 1). The advantage of the CA meth- 2018. The interviews consisted of on the development of the tour- od is that it is less subjective than 18 questions (see Appendix 2). A ism industry and “tourist–host direct interviews and allows for convenience sample of 6 women 3 interactions.” That is, the influ- the analysis of various aspects of and 14 men was selected. This ence of tourism is not one-sided: narratives, facts, and texts asso- sampling method focused on peo- both locals and tourists experi- ciated with a given phenomenon. ple who regularly visit the down- ence diverse influences through town area, whether for work or interaction. In the case of Baku, Along with three other field re- because they own property there: it can therefore be expected that searchers, I conducted a survey Arab tourists tend to cluster both Arab tourists and locals will of 200 respondents in Septem- downtown, meaning that people significantly change their culture ber 2018 in the Binagadi, Khatai, who spend a lot of time there feel and public behavior as this pro- Nasimi, Khazar, Sabail, Nizami, the effects of Arab tourism most cess continues. Surakhani, Sabunchu, Yasamal, strongly. A drawback of this sam- and Narimanov districts of Baku pling method is that the results Butler’s Tourist Area Life Cycle (see Appendix 4). The sampling are non-generalizable and the de- model (TALC) also helps to ex- method of the survey was sys- mographics of people represent- plain the effects of Arab tourism tematic random sampling, where ed in the downtown area create a 4 in Baku. This model predicts the sampling interval was every sampling bias (see Appendix 3). that a rise in the number of Arab 10,000th respondent as listed on tourists will fundamentally alter the last election list (before the The Tourism Sector in Num- the local community, forcing it to 2018 presidential election), with bers change development trajectories the selected starting point being in order to accommodate an in- the 20th person on the list. This Since 2012, the number of tour- flux of tourism. The local commu- method significantly diminishes ists visiting Azerbaijan has been nity, economy, and infrastructure the risk of sampling bias. The re- on a slow upward trajectory. Ac- will become primary suppliers of fusal rate was 30 percent. I used cording to the State Statistical accommodation, transportation, SPSS software to aggregate all Committee of the Republic of and other services to support the variables by gender. The mean Azerbaijan, the overall number tourism industry rather than de- age was 35, with the oldest 83 and of tourists increased slightly from veloping in accordance with the the youngest 18. Slightly more 2012 to 2017 (see Figure 1). needs of residents. than half of the respondents were CAP Fellows Paper 216 2 While this upward trend is mod- other many derogatory terms. Azerbaijan. Instead of using the est overall, the proportion of tour- Lately, the terms such as “ter- tropes of terrorism and funda- ists coming from Arabic countries rorist”, “fundamentalist” and mentalism, local media in Baku has risen significantly. Whereas in “blood-thirsty” are the terms prefer to emphasize the predato- 2015 tourists from Arabic-speak- that are over-ascribed to the ry sexual practices of Arab tour- Arabs. ing countries constituted 0.5 per- ists and characterize Arab men as cent of all visitors (9,020 total), “primeval” or “womanizers.” The However, content analysis of by 2017 their numbers had risen religious influence of Arab new- local media in Baku finds that 28-fold, to 259,299, or 10 percent comers and tourists has thus far different stereotypes and con- of the total number of visitors in gone largely unaddressed in local ceptions of Arabs prevail in that year.5 media. Very few media organiza- As Figure 2 shows, the vast ma- Figure 1. Trends in international tourism: number of ar- jority of the increase in Arab rivals and Arab tourists as a share of the total tourism to Azerbaijan came from six countries: the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iraq, Saudi Ara- bia, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait. To take one example, 186 times more UAE citizens visited Azer- baijan in 2017 than in 2012. The share of tourists from other re- gions of the world did not change anywhere near as dramatically in that period.6 Understanding Media Trends and Perceptions of Arabs Source: Author’s compilation based on State Statistical Committee As Arab tourists have flocked to of the Republic of Azerbaijan data (2018) Azerbaijan over the past three years, Azerbaijani media outlets Figure 2. Number of tourists from select Arabic-speaking have significantly misrepresent- countries to visit Azerbaijan between 2012 and 2017 ed Arab identity, painting it as monolithic and failing to differen- tiate between linguistic dialects, religious doctrines, and other identity markers.