Understanding conflicts at religious-tourism sites: The Baha'i World Center, Israel

• This research deals with conflicts within religious tourism sites.
• It is one of the first applications of frame analysis to tourism research.
• The work offers a framework for a comparative analysis of conflicts at religious-tourism sites.
• This study demonstrates the framework of conflict framing at the Baha'i World Center in Haifa, Israel.

This article analyzes a conflict stemming from the construction of a religious-tourism site —The Baha'i World Center, in Haifa, Israel and contributes to the literature on the relationship between religion, tourism, and conflict. We first propose a framing typology based on literature of conflicts, as well as analysis of empirical data, using Grounded Theory. We then apply the typology on the conflict around the construction of the Baha'i World Center in Haifa. Our main findings fall under three main themes, or super-frames: ‘Process,’ ‘Values,’ and ‘Issues’ — of which the ‘Process super-frame’ was found to have the dominant role in the Baha'i case study. Beyond that, we offer a method that may be useful in understanding the conflicts stemming from the construction of tourism at religious-tourism sites elsewhere and, at times, shed light on possible approaches to reframing disputes over tourism sites.