Touristic Bare Life: Precarity, Resident Dispossession, and the Politics of Exception

ABSTRACT This research note examines how tourism governance systematically produces labor and resident marginalization by normalizing crisis‐driven and exceptional forms of regulation. Drawing on Agamben's concepts of bare life and the state of exception, it conceptualizes touristic bare life as a condition in which tourism workers and residents remain economically essential yet politically and socially disposable. The study distinguishes between economic exclusion affecting precarious tourism labor and political exclusion experienced by residents in tourism‐intensive destinations. By reframing precarity as a governance outcome rather than a market failure, the research advances critical tourism theory and calls for justice‐oriented approaches that move beyond resilience and growth narratives.