Overtourism and Ontological (In)security in Southeast Asian Tourism: Balinese Community Responses to Russian Tourists

Abstract

While Southeast Asia’s post-pandemic recovery has led to a resurgence of overtourism, existing scholarship often prioritizes technical carrying capacity over the security of host community identity. This research investigates how Russian tourists’ behavior in Bali generates ontological insecurity and prompts collective resistance that transcends economic concerns. Employing a narrative analysis of public discourse from 2019 to 2025, the research identifies a paradox. Although Russian tourists accounted for only 2.56 percent of Bali’s 2024 arrivals, their presence provoked disproportionate political mobilization. State responses included establishing specialized task forces, increasing deportations, and proposing to revoke visa privileges. The findings suggest that visitor volume alone does not explain this phenomenon. Instead, behavioral transgressions, such as desecration of sacred sites and illegal business operations, positioned Russian tourists as existential threats to Balinese Hindu identity. The research carries ontological security theory from the state, where it usually sits, to the host community, showing how scapegoating and abjection turned diffuse anxiety about a changing island into fear of one group. The research proposes ontological carrying capacity to name a threshold that technical, volume-based models overlook, the point at which a host community begins to read tourism as a threat to who it is.