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There are a large number of destinations in which post-conflict tourism (PCT) might be a relevant development option. This chapter considers four destinations which have opted to use the PCT brand as part of their strategies to attract tourists. These destinations – Cambodia, Nicaragua, Rwanda and Bougainville (within the country of Papua New Guinea) – are on four different continents, had conflicts which ended in the last decade of the twentieth century and represent tourism industries at different stages of development. They were also chosen because they are at low or medium levels of development and have relatively small populations of less than 20 million people. The chapter considers the different ways in which PCT is or might be used not only to provide economic opportunities for local residents, but also as a means towards reconciliation, healing and recovery after conflicts which have resulted in many casualties and divided the people against each other. Each of the case study destinations have attempted to turn a negative aspect of their histories into an opportunity for development, with differing levels of success.

Floods are among the most significant and frequent hazards to affect communities in the downstream part of the Ba River in Western Viti Levu, Fiji Islands. They often leave in their wake displacements and death putting thousands at risk of sliding into poverty. Using the recent 2009 and 2012 floods, we examine how social capital aids in post-disaster response and recovery among residents in five selected villages in the downstream communities of the Ba River. Data were collected from a questionnaire survey administered to 97 households and semi-structured interviews with a further 20 respondents. It is conventionally believed that moving supplies, aid and expertise into flood-affected areas offers the best path to effective response and recovery. By contrast, our results indicate that residents of downstream communities in Ba District are using four approaches to create and deploy social capital among them to facilitate disaster response. The patterns of social capital used for effective response include practices of search and rescue, information, mutual assistance and commercial cooperation. Such strategies help to build resilience at household and community levels and reduce risks of loss of life and costly damage to property. The findings can be used to generate policies concerning the integration of social capital as a component of flood disaster response and recovery mechanisms.

In this chapter, the authors use emerging works on geopolitical ecologies to analyze the relations between tourism and the transboundary haze disaster in northern Thailand. The region’s ‘smoky season’, which occurs between February and April of each year, has become a recurring seasonal haze disaster that is reported to be the combined result of biomass burning and urban air pollution. Drawing on ethnographic research among urban tourism practitioners, as well as a critical discourse analysis of popular and social media reports and commentaries, the authors argue that geopolitical discourses of transboundary haze production are shaped by tourists and the tourism industry in ways that perpetuate inequitably distributed disaster risk. Transboundary haze, the authors further contend, has become an ecological actor that co-produces discourses of escape among mobile tourists and residents. This research contributes to emerging work that conceptualises the geopolitical ecologies of transboundary environmental disasters in relation to tourism mobilities in southeast Asia.

Nepal’s rich cultural and natural heritage – the basis of a flourishing tourism industry that contributes 8% to the country’s GDP – suffered heavily during the Gorkha earthquake that shook the country in April 2015. Recovery was challenged by a political-economic crisis that hampered mobility and delayed access to resources. Given the economic importance of tourism to Nepal, a revival of this industry was considered vital by public authorities and private sector representatives. This chapter discusses the response mechanisms of the tourism industry in Kathmandu to two sequential, overlapping stressors that brought challenges to the business sector beyond the usual. Interviews with hotel managers and owners, tour operators and trekking company owners have revealed that coping strategies varied from business-as-usual to completely new paths. To what extent do multiple disruptive events challenge a tourism industry to diverge from established paths of economic development? How did Nepal revive its tourism industry? In-depth interviews with tourism industry stakeholders brought forth evidence of unusual collaborative action towards a quick restoration of tourist arrivals and a positive image of the destination. Furthermore, a handful of companies have shifted their entire business strategy.

Studies of disaster and conflict often mention the Indonesian case of Aceh province because of its twin histories of separatist conflict and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, each with massive losses of life and infrastructural damages. This chapter addresses the tourism angle in Aceh’s tourism–disaster–conflict nexus with a review and analysis of the efforts to memorialise these events through the establishment of museums in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. Museums that preserve dark aspects of the past, such as violent wars, disasters and mass death must navigate the tension between providing a record of what has occurred and engaging with collective memory while not denying the individual experience of the event. The tsunami has been formally commemorated with a monumental, centrally located museum. Meanwhile, a few local non-governmental organisations with a small grant from an international donor struggled to establish a Peace and Human Rights Museum to commemorate the violence and human rights violations of the war in Aceh. Memories of Aceh’s conflict remain largely in the informal sphere. These divergent memorialisations of Aceh’s disasters and conflicts serve as a point of entry for examining how museums and their benefactors engage in contested memory politics.