Peace Promotion Through Volunteer Tourism

Introduction

International travelling promotes understanding and trust among people from different backgrounds. This line of thinking has brought up to surface the concept of peace through tourism. As tourists are many times peace messengers, they play an important role in peace promotion. This kind of promotion is many times more effective than diplomatic meeting and official government conferences, as peace in many developing countries is promoted between local inhabitants, tourism creates job opportunities and is a major factor of household income.

One of the expanding and promising forms of tourism is volunteer tourism. International volunteer tourism brings together people of different generations, heterogeneous cultural and religious backgrounds and diverse communities. On the basis of mutual understanding, volunteers and communities meet their human, environmental and social needs, demonstrate their attitude towards respect for the rights, dignity and culture of other countries, and promote equality of opportunities.

The connection between peace and volunteer tourism is so far under-researched topic. Therefore the aim of the chapter is to analyze how volunteer tourism can promote peace. It is the authors' attempt to find out, how can the connection of tourism and volunteering through creating specific improvements in areas such as education, healthcare, environmental preservation and community empowerment contribute to principles of peace.