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Article

Security and Securitization as Topics in Sustainability and Tourism Research

by
Jan Andrzej Wendt
1,* and
Agnieszka Bógdał-Brzezińska
2,*
1
Faculty of Social Science, Gdansk University, 4 Bażyńskiego Str., 80309 Gdańsk, Poland
2
Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw, 26/28 Krakowskie Przedmieście Str., 00927 Warsaw, Poland
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2024, 16(2), 905; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16020905
Submission received: 29 November 2023 / Revised: 18 January 2024 / Accepted: 19 January 2024 / Published: 21 January 2024
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security, Tourism and Sustainability)
Browse Figures
Versions Notes

Abstract

:
There are many published bibliometric works in the literature on the broadly understood topics of tourism, sustainability, and security (STS). Most of these studies present an indexed approach, showing the impact of works, journals, spatial diversity, and the most frequently published or cited authors. The research and analysis undertaken in our work had a different goal: they were an attempt to answer questions about the degree of interest of researchers in the issue of STS, the dynamics of research devoted to the topics of STS, and internal differentiation in the broadly understood concept of security/danger in STS research. Data from the Web of Science journal database were used for the analysis. To determine the number of articles devoted to the topics of security, tourism, and sustainability, several combined keywords and simple statistical analyses were used. In the last 10, and especially 5 years (2019–2023), in each of the three topic groups, there has been an exponential increase in publications in journals indexed in the WoS database. In the sustainability category, risk and security received the most responses; in the tourism, COVID-19, and risk category; and in the tourism, sustainability, risk, and COVID-19 category. The use of keywords indicated thematic diversity in the field of security in each of the examined categories. The greatest interest among STS researchers was in studies related to the “COVID-19” threat. The results of the analysis allowed us to conclude there is an ongoing process of securitization in tourism research.

1. Introduction

Safety has always been one of the most important issues for the existence of every human and their activities in life, work, and recreation. Safety in tourism is also one of the most important factors influencing the choice of destination or form of tourism [1,2,3]. Moreover, sustainable development is closely related to both tourism and security [4,5,6]. There is a clear contradiction between mass tourism and preserving the natural environment with as little interference as possible [7,8]. An increase in the volume of tourist traffic always leads to degradation of the environment, and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to preserve it for future generations. Additionally, the issue of sustainable development is closely related to security. We all feel the ongoing changes, such as global warming and the associated increase in threats to and negative impact on the natural environment [9,10,11]. The increase in research interest in security in fields unrelated to politics and defense is brought back to scientific circles with the achievements of the so-called Copenhagen School of International Relations. The school’s achievements that interest us are the concepts of security sectors and securitization [12,13,14]. This trend, which emerged in the 1990s in Western Europe [15,16], is also considered valuable in post-communist and non-European countries [17,18,19] and raises the need to analyze desecuritization tendencies [20]. According to the concept of security sectors, individual areas of activity of entities acting for their security (mainly states, regional organizations, alliances, and NGOs) should be analyzed as areas of triggering/disclosing threats that affect the comprehensive stability of these entities. In the case of tourism, these entities are also participants in the tourism trade, which expands the reflection and interpretation of securitization to include the element of individual security (human security) [21,22,23].
A researcher analyzing sectoral threats defines them in an inter-subjective way, i.e., taking into account the literature, media, political discourse, and broadly understood public debate, looking for objective confirmation in the data but also subjectively ranking them based on their set of beliefs. A researcher’s participation in the debate on a problem (e.g., climate change) reinforces the threat status given to the problem, thus presenting reality as changed and unstable. “When security becomes largely inter-subjective and conditioned by social practice, threats become a matter of interpretation” [18] (p. 80).
In the last two decades, a rapid increase in researcher interest in the issue of threats found in the areas of tourism and sustainable development has been observed. It can therefore be concluded that in research on the tourism sector and the sphere of sustainable development, there has been a change toward interest in risk as a new condition for undertaking research in both areas. It is worth considering the nature of the observed process of expanding the original specificity of tourism research with new content. Based on the number of publications on the research discussed above (containing references to the sphere of sustainable development, tourism, and security), it can be summarized that an upward trend in identity and methodological change can be observed in the above research areas. This may manifest a trend of multidisciplinarity [24] or interdisciplinarity [25]. In the literature related to the issue of threats to tourism and sustainable development, some studies clearly join the research discourse on the specificity of security sectors and securitization. Some examine the links between the securitization of tourism and national security [26] or the securitization of tourism in the context of the phenomenon of war [27]. Others draw connections between the securitization of elements/components of sustainable development and the issue of power [28,29].
It is necessary to emphasize the connections between the influence of current security policy and the growth of securitization discourse in biological and geographical sciences [30,31,32]. It should be recognized that the lack of formal terminology specific to security studies or political science does not mean that the authors of the research are not anchored in the securitization discourse. It seems that over the last 5 years, there has been a trend toward shifting the research discourse in the fields of tourism and sustainable development toward a securitization narrative. This is evidenced not only by the fact that publications are created containing keywords such as security sector of tourism or security of sustainability. The process of broadening the perception of security threats in its classical approach to include research areas of natural sciences becomes unmissable. In the discussed case, we can talk about the involuntary or unconscious securitization of the research discourse in the field of tourism or sustainable development (Figure 1).
The concept of security itself has always enjoyed great interest and has extensive literature [33,34,35]. Topics related to security are published in 102 journals from the list of journals indexed in the Web of Science (=WoS) database. Thousands of researchers deal with the topic of sustainable development, which is obvious due to the importance of the issue, publishing in 209 journals (WoS). As already indicated, in tourist traffic, safety is one of the important factors influencing the choice of tourist destination and form of tourism [36,37]. As in the case of sustainability, researchers can publish the results of their work in 149 journals with “tourism” in the title (WoS). The undertaken research shows a clear trend of security in tourist traffic [38,39,40,41,42]. The undertaken works include case studies [43] and present the relationships between the impacts of wars [44,45], terrorism [46,47,48,49,50], natural disasters [51,52] or the pandemic [53,54] and changes in tourist traffic.
On the basis of such extensive literature, which presents various aspects of threats (safety issues) in tourism in the context of sustainable development, the typical approach of bibliometric works, including citation indicators, diversity of journals, and lists of authors, was abandoned. Similarly, the geographical diversity of the centers where the publications were created was also disregarded. All the more so because such summaries can be obtained using the tools available in the WoS system. In our opinion, three questions are more interesting for the research:
(1)
The degree of researcher interest in the topic of security in tourism (“security” & “tourism”) and the security of a sustainable environment (“security” & “sustainability”) compared to security in tourism in the context of sustainable development (“security” & “tourism” & “sustainability”;
(2)
The dynamics of research devoted to the topics of security, tourism, and sustainable development;
(3)
In the context of searching for manifestations of the securitization of discourse, is there a homogeneous understanding/application of the concept of security in research on sustainable development and tourism?
Therefore, the aim of the work undertaken was to answer the above questions, which will indicate the most frequently researched issues in the field of security in tourism in the context of sustainable development and the dynamics of the interest in the topics of security, tourism, and sustainable development by researchers publishing in WoS journals.
Two research hypotheses will be verified. The first hypothesis assumes that the share of works with the keyword “COVID-19” will be greater in works in the field of tourism than in works in the field of sustainable development. The second research hypothesis also assumes a greater share of words describing insecurity (war, terrorism, security, threat) in works on tourism than on security. The results of the undertaken analysis may indicate the main fields of current research and directions of potential research, important from the point of view of the security of a sustainable environment, but not undertaken to a significant extent in contemporary tourism research.
The use of WoS tools available to every user allows for a graphical representation of the geographical distribution of researchers writing on the following topics: security and tourism; security and sustainable development; and security, sustainable development, and tourism. It also facilitates analysis of the centers (universities/departments) where the authors work. The novelty of our article is that, using simple computational techniques, we went beyond the bibliometric tools available in the WoS database itself. Our article is part of research on the formation of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary trends in contemporary research on tourism and sustainable development. We show the development of this trend, taking into account the process of the securitization of tourism and sustainable development research. Our article shows that the securitization trend in both areas is not uniform. It dominates research on tourism in the context of sustainable development.
The further material is divided into several parts. Section 2 presents and justifies the scope of the research undertaken and the selection of the database. Section 3 presents the results of the analysis divided into “researcher interest in the topic of security in tourism”, “dynamics of research on security, tourism, and sustainable development”, and “researcher interest in the topic of security in tourism in relation to security in tourism extended to sustainable development”. Section 4 is devoted to the discussion of the obtained results, and Section 5 is the presentation of the conclusions in theoretical and practical terms.

2. Materials and Methods

The topic and the analytical and review nature of the work undertaken implied an analysis of available publications in the fields of security, tourism, and sustainable development [11,33,55,56]. The selection of publications was performed using the publicly available largest databases of indexed journals and scientific articles, Scopus and Web of Science. A preliminary analysis of the number of articles in both databases and, above all, the availability of the “topic” option, which allows searching by keywords, led to the conclusion that the analysis of publications indexed in the Web of Science database was advisable (Table 1).
It was assumed that it was obvious that researcher interest in the subject matter was reflected in the publication of scientific articles in the best possible journals.
After selecting the database of indexed journals (WoS) and the article search key (topic), keywords were selected for the next stage of analysis based on the analysis of the topics of the found works. To answer the first research question, a quantitative analysis of keywords and phrases was selected allowing for a comparison of interest in security in tourism and security in tourism in the context of sustainable development (“security” & “tourism” and “security” & “tourism” & “sustainability”). The same work search procedure was adopted for “sustainability”. The answer to the second research question was obtained by analyzing changes in the number of published articles in three time periods. The first one showed the number of all works published/indexed in the Web of Science database since the beginning of their indexing, the second one showed the number of works published in the years 2014–2024 (generally until 31 October 2023; several works included in the WoS database already had the year of publication 2024 indicated); and the third one was the number of works published in 2019–2024. The answer to the third question was obtained by replacing the word “security” in the search process with subsequent words that may be considered a synonym for threat (lack of security). Due to the relatively large selection of such words, the analysis was limited to 12 categories (synonymous words), in which the number of indexed articles exceeded 10 items. Therefore, the answer to the third question allowed us to diversify the topics of the analyzed works, in terms of “topics” according to the category “security or its synonym” (=A) & “tourism” & “sustainability”, in which the following searches were also performed in addition to “security”: “COVID-19”; “crime”; “disaster”; “economic crises”; “economic instability”; “fear”; “political instability”; “risk”; “state security”; “terrorism”; and “war”.
The quantitative analysis used simple statistical calculations showing the share of publications in the individual categories searched according to the selected key and in the presented time intervals. We believe that given the selected research topic, the choice of quantitative analysis, and the adopted form of work (review), the indicated tools were sufficient to obtain answers to the questions asked.
To summarize the above, the analytical process can be presented in the following steps:
(1)
Selection of a database based on the analysis of titles, topics, and number of publications;
(2)
Selection of keywords and search phrases;
(3)
Collection of data for analysis to obtain answers to the research questions;
(4)
Analysis of the obtained results;
(5)
Indicating the differences between researcher interest in the topic of safety in tourism itself and the safety of sustainable development compared to safety in tourism taking into account sustainable development;
(6)
Indicating the dynamics of researcher interest in security, tourism, and sustainability;
(7)
Indicating the most and least researched areas in tourism related to security and sustainability;
(8)
Verification of the hypotheses.

3. Results

3.1. Researcher Interest in the Topic of Safety in Tourism in Relation to Safety in Tourism Extended to Sustainable Development

According to the data selection and query process presented above, to answer the first question, a search for the number of articles was performed using the keys “A” & ”sustainability” (column B); “A” & ”tourism” (column C); and “A” & ”tourism” & ”sustainability” (column D), where instead of “A” there were 12 keywords associated with safety and threat. After obtaining the number of articles by keywords, the percentage share of “security” & “tourism” & “sustainability” was calculated, for a broader approach including only “security” & “sustainability” (column E) and a similar comparison and calculations were performed for “security” & “tourism” (column F) (Table 2).
The analysis of the data collected in Table 2 allowed us to conclude that there were a much larger number of publications on the topic of security defined in various ways (keywords “A”) in relation to sustainable development than in relation to tourism. Out of 12 keywords searched, only in three (war, crime, and terrorism) were the number of works indexed on Web of Science combining tourism and security greater than the number of works combining sustainability and tourism. In other cases, articles on sustainability and security had a numerical advantage. It could also be concluded that a much larger number of researchers (publishing on WoS) were involved in the study of sustainability than in the study of tourism. Only terrorism, crime, and war were of greater interest to tourism researchers than to sustainability researchers. This allowed us to acknowledge confirmation of the initial assumption about the securitization of the research discourse in the area of tourism with reference to the traditional dimensions of security (hard security).
Comparison of the percentage of articles found using three entries (security, tourism, sustainable development = STS) compared to two entries (security, sustainable development = SS) indicated a relatively low interest of SS researchers in the issue of tourism. On average, only every 19th article from the SS entries was related to tourism, and every 14th article from the group of works “security and tourism” (=ST) included sustainable development. The results for individual security categories (A) were different. SS researchers were most interested in works with the tourism aspect, when “A” was defined as terrorism, COVID-19, and economic crisis. However, the first of the given topics was not reliable due to the relatively small number of works (148) devoted to this topic. In turn, among ST researchers, the greatest share of works was related to sustainability, when “A” was defined by economic crisis, COVID-19, and security. This confirmed the initial assumption about the securitization of the research discourse in the area of tourism with reference to hard security and soft security.

3.2. Dynamics of Research on Security, Tourism, and Sustainable Development

The next research question concerned the dynamics of publishing works on security, sustainability, and tourism. To find the answer, three time periods were adopted, and for each of them the number of works indexed in the WoS database was searched. The first period covered the years from the first publication until 2024, the second—the last 10 years until 2024, and the third—the last 5 years, up to and including 2024 (Table 3).
The table above shows the share of publications in the fields of “security”, “tourism”, and “sustainability”, indexed in the WoS database in three time ranges. The first period was from the beginning of indexing of works until 2024. The second period covered 10 years from 2014 to 2023, and the third period covered 5 years from 2019 to 2023. The year given for each of the searched categories (A) indicated when the first work indexed in the database was published. The total number of works in the entire period under study is given in Table 2. Simple mathematical calculations allowed us to determine what percentage of all works since the beginning of their indexing were published in the last 10 and 5 years.
The analysis of the data from Table 3 led to the conclusion that there was an explosion of publications in all three types of articles searched using keywords. For example, in the first analyzed category, for security defined as “risk” in relation to “sustainability” (SS), almost 80% of the 25,651 works indexed since 1990 were published in the last 10 years, including well over half of all works (56.06%) published in the last 5 years. In the security category, in relation to “tourism” (ST), indexed since 1975, 79% of the 7111 works were published in the last 10 years, and as many as 55% of all works were published in the years 2019–2023. And finally, in the search category using the key “security” & “tourism” & “sustainability” (STS), over 87% of the 548 scientific articles were published after 2014, and 63% were published after 2019. The analysis of other data led to similar conclusions. Generally, with a few exceptions mentioned below, more than 70% of all indexed works were published over the last 10 years in most of the analyzed categories. Interestingly, among ST data, the “political instability” category reached 53.80%. This, in our opinion, confirmed the securitization of the discourse in fields other than political science.
Another exception was the security category defined as “COVID-19”. Due to the time of the epidemic, all works on this topic were published in the last 5 years; therefore, this group should be excluded as not representative of the analysis undertaken. It is worth pointing out that the number of works indexed in the WoS database in this search group was 5332. All but one were published since 2020, which meant that on average, 119 works were published per month, and 1391 were published per year. On the one hand, this proves the enormous importance of the problem and the genuine interest of thousands of researchers in the problem of COVID-19 in terms of (only) security and sustainability. On the other hand, this raises the question about the possibility of other individual researchers getting acquainted with such an enormous amount of research material and about the possibility of using it to solve emerging problems. Similar concerns can be had about the application function of the research undertaken and the published results. Works indexed in WoS are characterized by a high substantive level, interesting research results, and a theoretical approach. Therefore, perhaps the following statement is not fully justified, but the analysis of the number of published works indicated publication inflation in many areas of research related to STS. This last statement does not change the basic conclusion resulting from the analysis of the dynamics of the increase in work in the WoS database. We believe that this explosion of publications was primarily the result of ever-increasing environmental threats and tourism development, as well as an increase in the awareness of researchers in the areas of tourism and sustainable development in analyzing these issues/threats in the securitization discourse.
Equally interesting and, to some extent unexpected, was the relatively lower pace of the publication of works in the categories of “war”, “crime”, and “terrorism” compared to the dynamics of most works in the individual threat categories (A). For the keywords searched in “sustainability” and “tourism”, the share of published (indexed) works in the last 5 years was clearly lower than that in the other categories, on average by 10%. This was surprising because “war” and “terrorism” are unfortunately constantly present in contemporary reality. The smaller increase in the number of publications on this topic, as it can be assumed, may be the result of a lower degree of cooperation between sustainability and tourism researchers and security, political sciences, and international relations researchers. However, the latter requires additional detailed research on individual texts indexed in the WoS. Hence there is a need, expressed for a long time, to increase the interdisciplinarity of the undertaken research, especially on such interdisciplinary issues by their very nature, such as security, sustainability, and tourism.

3.3. Interest in the Topic of Security in Tourism Compared to Interest in the Problems of Security, Tourism, and Sustainable Development (in the Analyzed Studies)

The last goal of the work was an attempt to answer the question about the diversity of researcher interest in individual categories (synonyms) of security in the fields of tourism and sustainability. At this point, it is necessary to emphasize the research limitations, presented in more detail in the final part of the work, which result from the subjective choice of the definition of security and the lack of security threats in the context of sustainable development and tourism. The charts below show the percentage of articles indexed in the WoS database divided into three groups according to the search results based on the keywords “security” & “sustainability” (SS) (Figure 2); “security” & “tourism” (ST) (Figure 3); and “security” & “tourism” & “sustainability” (STS) (Figure 4). Each chart shows the percentage of articles differentiated according to “A” in three time intervals: for the last 5 years, for 10 years, and all indexed works (Figure 2).
In the group of SS articles, most works were related to the keyword “risk” (over 40%), then “security” (over 20%), and in third place “COVID-19”. The “economic crisis” papers also accounted for more than 5% of the total number of indexed articles. Variability in the time frame was basically non-existent, apart from an understandable increase in the share of “COVID-19” publications in the last 5 years.
The diversity of security topics in tourism research was different, with studies with the crucial keywords “risk” and “COVID-19” competing for first place. However, while works with the keyword “risk” constituted 33% of all indexed works and those with “COVID-19” constituted 21%, works with “COVID-19” constituted 34% of all publications indexed in the last 5 years and works with “risk” constituted 28% (Figure 3).
In addition to the abovementioned cases, the ST group included the topics of “security” (9.59%), “economic crisis” (8.50%), “war” (7.13%), and “disaster” (7.10%). The slightly smaller shares of these security categories in the last 5 years were due to the appearance of numerous publications related to “COVID-19”, which resulted in a reduction in the percentage share of the total number of indexed works.
There was a clear difference in researcher interest between sustainability and tourism in the case of “security”, which played a greater role in sustainability research (24.66%) than in tourism research (9.59%). This allowed us to recognize a higher level of securitization of the research discourse in the area of sustainability than in the area of tourism. The share of individual security categories in works searched using the keywords “security” & “tourism” & “sustainability” (Figure 4) was largely a result of the interests of sustainability researchers and tourism researchers in the context of a diverse approach to security.
The greatest interest among STS researchers was undoubtedly in research related to security in the sense of the “COVID-19” threat, the share of which in the total surveyed group of indexed articles was almost 28% and was the largest in the last 5 years, reaching 38%. As in other cases, only the ”risk” category could compete with it (30.70%). Among the remaining words used to describe security or threat, more than 5% of all publications recorded “disaster”, “security”, and “economic crisis”. The remaining seven categories had shares of 2% or less.

4. Discussion

Due to the assumptions adopted in this work regarding the quantitative approach, the analysis of dynamics, and the diversity of topics in the field of security between works focused on safety in tourism (ST), security in sustainable development (SS), and security in the field of the special issue (STS), discussion of the obtained results is relatively difficult. It has, to some extent, the quality of a literature review, but in this case, in our opinion, it seems justified. The latest published bibliometric work on security and tourism [56] included 597 works (from Scopus) and confirmed our results about the rapid increase in research and citations on this topic in the last 12 years. However, the remaining conclusions concerned indicators that we did not analyze in our work.
The analysis of the literature on bibliometrics in the field of security and sustainability confirmed the purposefulness of the database we selected for analysis [55,57]. The choice of WoS was also substantively justified by Chen et al. [58] and M.A. Anwar et al. [33] in works in the field of security, emphasizing the interdisciplinary indexing of citations in this database, which confirmed the assumptions of our literature analysis. M.A. Anwar et al., additionally, indicated that the most important research topics in the field of security include food insecurity, health, climate, and sustainable development. These findings corresponded with the results we received for the keywords “COVID-19” and “sustainability”. In turn, the use of the word “risk” with various additions (e.g., analysis), as an important factor in the field of security, was confirmed by the research of X. Gou et al. [59].
D. Agapito [60] dealt with a relatively narrow field of research on understanding and designing tourist experiences around the senses. The results obtained were confirmed in our research in terms of the possibility of increasing the connection between research on tourism and the development of sustainability, as in the case of the discussed research in the field of designing tourist experiences. Another work in the field of text analysis of published articles on tourism was devoted to the length of tourist stay [61]. Apart from confirming the selection of the WoS database, in terms of the adopted indicators, it was similar to the work of A. Toker and O. Emir [56] but differed from it in the scope of the selection of topics of the analyzed texts.
Subsequent works [62,63,64,65,66] and analyses with similarly detailed bibliometric indicators in the scope of the researched topic unfortunately did not bring new content to this discussion due to the selection of one scientific journal [62,63] or their classic bibliometric approach. Against this background, interesting results were obtained from the analysis by A. Niñerola et al. [67], which addressed the significant growth in the literature. It also brought up the issue of the small number of works (only 6) that had over 300 citations, which to some extent confirmed our results in terms of publication inflation and the application significance of a significant part of the works. It also showed, similar to our work, that according to the analysis of the trend network based on keywords, sustainable development is becoming a strategic approach for companies and tourist destinations. We are pleased that the authors’ opinion, similar to ours, was that this approach, which is interdisciplinary in nature, has significant potential.
Works analyzing the literature in the fields of tourism and sustainability [68,69,70,71] confirmed our results in their conclusions, but they were characterized by a different research approach. Research by L. Ruhanen et al. [68] on sustainable tourism included only the four highest-ranked journals, but they confirmed the predominance of case study texts and empirical research. This led to the conclusion that it was advisable to expand the topic to include works focusing on testing and applying theories through empirical research. This was consistent with our conclusions regarding the broadening of the topic with an interdisciplinary approach, extended beyond sustainability to include security. The latter has already been reflected in numerous works on this topic published in the last 5 years.
Cognitively and methodologically interesting was the work of M.A. Koseoglu et al. [69] summarizing the results of the bibliometric research to date. What was interesting was the dominance of review studies based on the number of citations, authors, or geographical differences. This could be considered an indication of the need for a different research approach, which we tried to adopt in our analysis. The results of another work [70] confirmed the role and importance of sustainability in tourism research, as indicated by the results of our keyword analysis. The authors of this work confirmed the assessment in terms of the rapid growth in literature and use of the WoS database. Research that fell within the mainstream of tourism bibliometrics could be considered. They mainly presented an analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords, co-citations, bibliographic linking, and co-authorship. In our research, an important aspect was security and the combination of tourism, sustainability, and security, so far poorly represented in the literature. Similarly, the research of M.I. Diéguez-Castrillón et al. [71] emphasized the increase in the number of publications and confirmed the development of a multidisciplinary research approach. The latter seemed to confirm our results that the transition from social and environmental sciences (tourism) to the area of technology will expand the application of the research undertaken, especially in the security aspect. In summarizing the discussed results of the analysis, it can be concluded that the approach adopted in this work differs from the dominant approach taken in bibliometric research. The conducted research attempted to identify relationships and similarities in research topics for three research areas (security, tourism, and sustainability), which, in our opinion, led to the identification of common topics in these fields and showed potential directions for new, interdisciplinary research. Most of the works discussed in this part contained analyses of keywords, authors, citations, and geographical diversity, which perfectly systematized the literature in many approaches but was most often thematically limited to tourism and sustainability. Based on the discussion, we can also conclude that the research assumptions adopted in our work were correct regarding the use of keywords for analysis and the source of data.

5. Conclusions

The results of the work undertaken allowed to answer the research questions. There was a clear difference in the number and percentage of texts containing particular keywords in the fields of tourism, security, and sustainability. Similarly, disparity in the number of works on individual concepts related to sustainable development could be observed. Out of 12 searched keywords (Table 2), only in three (war, crime, and terrorism) were the number of works indexed on the Web of Science combining tourism and security greater than the number of works combining sustainability and tourism. In other cases, articles on sustainability and security had a numerical advantage. It can also be concluded that a much larger number of researchers (publishing on WoS) are involved in the study of sustainability than in the study of tourism. Only terrorism, crime, and war are of greater interest to tourism researchers than to sustainability researchers. The comparison of the percentage of articles found using three entries (STS) compared to two entries (SS, ST) indicated that sustainability researchers are less interested in tourism issues. Tourism researchers, on the other hand, are more interested in the issue of sustainability in terms of security.
The analysis of data showing publication dynamics (Table 3) led to the conclusion of a publication explosion in all three article types searched using keywords in the last 5 years (2019–2023). As many as 25,651 works indexed on the WoS have been published since 1990 in the “risk” category. Almost 80% of all works were published in the last 10 years, and more than half of all articles (56.06%) were published in the last 5 years. In the security category, in relation to “tourism”, indexed since 1975, 79% of the 7111 works were published in the last 10 years, and as many as 55% of all works were published in the years 2019–2023. In the search category using the key “security” & “tourism” & “sustainability”, over 87% of the 548 scientific articles were published after 2014, and 63% were published after 2019. Such a huge number of works proves, on the one hand, the enormous importance of the problem and the genuine interest of thousands of researchers in the problem of COVID-19 in terms of threat to tourism. On the other hand, the question arises about the possibility of getting acquainted with such an enormous amount of research material and its practical use.
The use of keywords allowed us to identify differences in researcher interest in particular aspects of security (or threats). In the group of SS articles, most works were related to the keyword “risk” (over 40%), then “security” (over 20%), and in third place “COVID-19”. The diversity of security topics in tourism research was different, with studies with the keywords “risk” and “COVID-19” competing for first place. The keyword “risk” constituted 33% of all indexed works and “COVID-19” constituted 21%, with works with “COVID-19” constituting 34% of all publications indexed in the last 5 years and works with “risk” constituting 28% (Figure 3). The greatest interest among STS researchers was undoubtedly in research related to security in the sense of the “COVID-19” threat, the share of which in the total studied group of indexed articles was almost 28% and was the largest in the last 5 years, reaching 38%. The latter positively verified the first research hypothesis. The second hypothesis, for the group of ST articles, was positively verified for the keywords “war” and “security”. On the other hand, the term “terrorism”, as the topic of works in this group, concerned only 3.77% of the indexed articles, which negatively verified this part of the hypothesis.
In terms of theory, the research undertaken indicated the ongoing process of securitization of the research discourse in the area of tourism and sustainable development. In terms of the utilitarian nature of the research, the obtained results allowed us to indicate research directions that are too underrepresented in published texts. A real problem related to publication and research inflation on some topics related to sustainable development and “COVID-19” was also pointed out. In the case of keywords related to sustainability and security, the political implications of the choice of this topic by many authors should also be emphasized. The war in Ukraine and the real threat of global warming are on the agenda of many governments and international agencies. However, the confirmation of those assumptions requires additional research and detailed analysis of the texts’ subject matter for its scientific verification.
Although not all of the researched articles contained the strictly defined keywords, security and securitization, this study found that the presence of synonymous concepts or elements of the description of the security phenomenon, both in the positive aspect (actions to eliminate threats) and negative aspect (threats themselves—estimated data in the tables above) confirmed the thesis about the securitization of the research discourse in the areas of tourism and sustainable development. It is a discourse strongly characterized by the message that treating the problems of sustainable development and tourism is closely related to maintaining security and avoiding the imposed threats. It should be emphasized that the obtained results indicated the need for further research in the field of global and regional security in connection with sustainable development and tourism. Potential new research directions, poorly recognized so far, are regional security (challenges for tourism in African countries affected by drought—regional water security), national security (the problem of survival of countries with a developed tourism sector at risk of losing territories as a result of rising ocean water levels), and human security in all tourism security challenges.
At the same time, the analyzed research/articles showed a tendency to increase in number and maintain several years of popularity for specific research topics related to tourism and sustainable development in the context of security (health safety and tourism during and after the COVID-19 pandemic; water security and sustainable development and migration processes). These trends cannot be treated as reflecting the temporary popularity of the issue. Rather, they are evidence of the escalation of the growing level of awareness of the importance of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research aimed at revealing the importance of problems related to the security dimension. It also seems that there is an increased level of group securitization awareness in the face of the so-called global problems of the modern world.
Each work, especially one in which arbitrary assumptions are made regarding the selection of materials, has its limitations. It should therefore be emphasized that the obtained statistical results and conclusions from the analysis retain their cognitive value, taking into account a number of limitations affecting the final results. First of all, the analysis was quantitative, which resulted from the huge amount of research material that individual researchers were unable to analyze in a reasonable time without the use of AI programs. Another limitation was the selection of the database of indexed works. There were more studies in the Scopus database than in the Web of Science database, but the principles sought in both databases were not the same. Therefore, another limitation was the subjective selection of the Web of Science database using the “topic” function, which was not available in the Scopus database. This led to the conclusion that using a different database or different search options may lead to partially different results. Another limitation of the study was the assumption that the highest-rated databases of scientific publications were the most reliable sources of knowledge about the representativeness of the examined securitization trend in articles in the fields of tourism, sustainable development, and security. The research limitations also included the assumption that the selected synonyms of security were representative of the discourse related to this category created by researchers dealing with tourism and sustainable development, and the assumption that the synonyms of security used in the articles were treated by the authors of these articles as their synonyms. The abovementioned limitations should be taken into account, but in our opinion, they do not significantly affect the final conclusions of the analysis.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; methodology, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; software, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; validation, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; formal analysis, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; investigation, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; resources, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; data curation, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; writing—original draft preparation, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; writing—review and editing, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; visualization, J.A.W. and A.B.-B.; supervision, J.A.W. and A.B.-B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Data is contained within the article.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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Sustainability 16 00905 g001
Figure 1. Scheme of securitization of discourse in tourism.
Figure 1. Scheme of securitization of discourse in tourism.
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Figure 2. Security and threats in articles on sustainability in works from the WoS database.
Figure 2. Security and threats in articles on sustainability in works from the WoS database.
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Figure 3. Security and threats in articles on tourism in works from the WoS database.
Figure 3. Security and threats in articles on tourism in works from the WoS database.
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Figure 4. Security and threats in articles on tourism and sustainability in works from the WoS database.
Figure 4. Security and threats in articles on tourism and sustainability in works from the WoS database.
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Table 1. Number of scientific articles by keywords in the Scopus and Web of Science databases (as of 31 October 2023).
Table 1. Number of scientific articles by keywords in the Scopus and Web of Science databases (as of 31 October 2023).
Searched PhrasesScopus
(Title)		Web of Science (Title)Web of Science (Topic)
Security194,083150,428589,416
Tourism68,64760,547123,787
Sustainability86,61068,889299,524
Security, tourism2251492077
Security, sustainability69351514,012
Tourism, sustainability147712199085
Security, tourism, sustainability32209
Table 2. The number of articles in words searched according to the given key (as of 31 October 2023).
Table 2. The number of articles in words searched according to the given key (as of 31 October 2023).
Keyword “A”“Sustainability”
& “A”		“Tourism”
& “A”		“Sustainability” &
“Tourism” & “A”		D/B
(%)		D/C
(%)
ABCDEF
risk25,65171115482.147.71
COVID-19533245544949.2610.85
economic crisis347718292106.0411.48
security13,90820632091.5010.13
disaster282015281354.798.84
war11431535423.672.74
state security2026361361.789.97
fear752667334.394.95
crime408540235.644.26
terrorism1488122214.862.71
economic instability408234204.908.55
political instability316289134.114.50
Table 3. Dynamics of “security, tourism, and sustainability” publications indexed in WoS (as of 31 October 2023).
Table 3. Dynamics of “security, tourism, and sustainability” publications indexed in WoS (as of 31 October 2023).
Keyword “A”“Sustainability”
& “A”		“Tourism”
& “A”		“Sustainability” & “Tourism”
& “A”
Y (year)10 Y (%)5 Y (%)Y (year)10 Y (%)5 Y (%)Y (year)10 Y (%)5 Y (%)
risk199081.9156.06197579.0052.99199587.5963.14
COVID-192019100.00100.002019100.00100.002020100.00100.00
economic crisis199278.6652.00199081.1453.42200287.1465.71
security199184.4357.26197780.2251.00200692.3466.03
disaster199085.0456.91198980.8953.93200689.6361.48
war199271.6546.02198669.4538.24200073.8150.00
state security199783.6155.43199880.6152.63200688.8952.78
fear200278.5955.45199278.8657.57200284.8581.82
crime199276.9646.57197466.1137.96201086.9630.43
terrorism199269.5943.92198773.8947.90201295.4572.73
economic instability199077.9453.92199481.6255.13199970.0050.00
political instability199253.8035.76199477.8552.94199976.9261.54
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Wendt, J.A.; Bógdał-Brzezińska, A. Security and Securitization as Topics in Sustainability and Tourism Research. Sustainability 2024, 16, 905. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16020905

AMA Style

Wendt JA, Bógdał-Brzezińska A. Security and Securitization as Topics in Sustainability and Tourism Research. Sustainability. 2024; 16(2):905. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16020905

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Wendt, Jan Andrzej, and Agnieszka Bógdał-Brzezińska. 2024. "Security and Securitization as Topics in Sustainability and Tourism Research" Sustainability 16, no. 2: 905. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16020905

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