Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Cultural tourism provides to the visitors with the opportunity to establish a conscious and complete itinerary over time across the respective field, protecting thus all cultural goods from being over-exploited. This study demonstrates how the importance of cultural tourism goes much further than the splendor of humanity’s tangible creation and the expressions of our intangible legacy. Cultural tourism is presented in relation to politics and justice and as a concept intertwined with the notions of human rights, economic rights, and identity. The key question of the current research is the role of culture in terms of interstate relations and also the organization, implementation, and objective of cultural tourism as a means of communication. Central government as opposed to local authorities is unable to see prompt implementation of such studies and immediate results that mostly deal with decision making-related process and foreign policy. However, if we are to investigate international relations in view of their long-term prospective, it becomes clear that cultural interactions are some of the most penetrating and intense traits of the human history. In this context, we address the particularly neglected facet of cultural tourism -and culture in general- more cautiously in transnational relations. The current study I am working on is fixed on investigating and analyzing certain phenomena via the empirical control of project theoretical assumptions. The proposed case study is about the Aegean Sea and the Greek-Turkish cultural, touristic, and diplomatic relations.