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Post-conflict economies are characterized by high, and often growing, levels of debt. At the same time, peace is particularly fragile in the aftermath of a conflict. This chapter studies how debt affects the risk of war in the 10 years that follow the end of a previous conflict. After controlling for per-capita income and other economic, political, and geographical factors, external debt is found to increase the risk of war. Conversely, the effect of domestic debt is negligible. The policy implication for the international community is clear: debt relief helps stabilize peace in war-torn economies.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) requires that women’s experiences, needs, and perspectives are incorporated into the political, legal, and social decisions in order to achieve transitional justice. In a post-conflict society, peace, and security should be understood in a wider context of justice encompassing accountability process and mechanisms, reparations for victims and upholding the principle of equality in all spheres of lives. Thus, the objective of the UNSCR 1325 is to increase women’s participation in decision-making in the peace process to address the wider context of women’s situation in post-conflict society and committing to protect women’s socioeconomic rights. It is obvious that women’s mere presence in decision-making process is insufficient in restoring stability in post-conflict society. Women’s participation will only be meaningful if they are empowered to be active rather than passive participants. Hence, it is argued that women’s leadership could only be built, if they are given adequate representation in decision-making process and institutions. Women’s participation in decision-making and women’s economic empowerment has a symbiotic impact on each other. When women are not stable economically and unable to freely make social choices and take responsibilities, they will not have the courage to compete in an election. Thus, this brief study argues that the economic marginalization (overt and covert discrimination) exposes women to multiple discrimination in post-conflict society in Sri Lanka. Hence, countries like Sri Lanka need to address the existing gap in this sphere of women empowerment and leadership. It concludes that the realization of women’s rights to equality in post-conflict Sri Lanka may be a slow process, but the Sri Lankan experiences provide a good case study on how to face the different challenges in post-conflict context.

This chapter introduces the tourism–disaster–conflict nexus through a comprehensive review of the contemporary social science literature. After reviewing conceptual definitions of tourism, disaster and conflict, the chapter explores various axes that link through this nexus. The linkages between tourism and disaster include tourism as a trigger or amplifier of disasters, the impacts of disasters on the tourism industry, tourism as a driver of disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction strategies in the tourism sector. Linkages between tourism and conflict include the idea that tourism can be a force for peace and stability, the niche status of danger zone or dark heritage tourism, the concept of phoenix tourism in post-conflict destination rebranding, tourism and cultural conflicts, and tourism’s conflicts over land and resources. Linkages between disaster and conflict include disasters as triggers or intensifiers of civil conflict, disaster diplomacy and conflict resolution, disaster capitalism, and gender-based violence and intra-household conflict in the wake of disasters. These are some of the conversations that organise this volume, and this introductory chapter ends with a summary of the chapters that follow.

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.

Existing literature on the post-war agency of women combatants focuses on macro-level political and economic processes as measures of their agency in the post-war society. I try to present a more complicated and complete picture of women ex-combatants' experiences of post-war agency by including socio-cognitive process to understand their post-war experiences. After categorising the extant research into four categories – post-war as regression; structural forces shaping post-war regression; situated agency of women ex-combatants; and micro-politics of post-war – I introduce the concept of ‘strategic silence’. This concept indicates the capacity of female ex-combatants to consciously stay silent and to highlight the collective gains and empowerment for women while sacrificing the self. Secondly, I introduce the concept of ‘epistemic resistance’ which captures their ability to resist dominant narratives of social transformation by the Maoists in Nepal. I focus specifically on narratives around marriage during the insurgency. I conducted 39 extensive interviews during my fieldwork in Nepal (2017–2018) involving female ex-combatants, their leaders (male and female) and experts. This chapter makes an important intervention in feminist security studies and feminist international relations through a specific focus on gender in post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding.

Cultural, social, and psychological perspectives on mergers assume conflict to be an important mediator of post-merger outcomes. Yet, despite a growing literature on the human side of mergers, conflict in mergers remains poorly understood.

Based on the disputing perspective and negotiated order theory, a contextual and dynamic approach is presented along with propositions to guide future empirical research in the form of a process model of post-merger order negotiation.

When negotiating the post-merger order, different issues emerge that are embedded in the broader context of the merger.

Adopting this theoretical framework allows us to understand the intergroup dynamics and antagonistic behavior observed in mergers.

Iraqi universities in the aftermath of invasion in 2003 experienced extremely high levels of “post”-war violence and insecurity. The most widely known dimension of this violence is the shocking assassination campaign that killed hundreds of Iraqi academics. This paper provides an analysis of violence and insecurity in post-2003 that takes a broader optic and considers multiple forms of vulnerability to attack including insurgencies, sectarian conflict, and criminal violence. It also considers the various responses to the security dilemma taken by Coalition forces – principally counter-terrorism and stabilization efforts – and by Iraqi policy-makers and higher education communities, including security measures, politicization, ethno-sectarianization, and displacement.

Purpose – This research aims to explore Qanun Aceh post-conflict enacted in the legislation of Government of Aceh through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and enhancement policy of Wali Nanggroe associated with educational development.

Approach Methodology – The review of the literature links to the Qanun Aceh exploring the Wali Nanggroe institution through normative theory. A qualitative method was used to find a strategic policy of the Legislation Government of Aceh related to documents used in data analysis.

Findings – The study found the existence of the Wali Nanggroe institution brought several opportunities and challenges of unifying Aceh people post-conflict. The discussion of the Wali Nanggroe Institution has brought new dynamics in the policy and educational development in post-conflict Aceh. The Government of Aceh and the Parliament did not take the policy for educational building in order for the society to have an understanding of the Wali Nanggroe institutional position as stated in the Law of Government Aceh (LoGA).

Research Limitations – The examination of these dynamics and prospect of the Wali Nanggroe institution is linked to the policy on educational development for the Aceh people and implementation of the LoGA post-conflict of the Aceh Government and the Government of Indonesian Republic.

Practical Implications – The solution offered is to improve the educational system to give a political understanding of the Aceh people.

This study investigated the potential for the development of dark tourism in Lebanon, a destination that has suffered multiple crises in recent years including conflicts and the world's largest non-nuclear explosion, which devastated a large section the country's capital city, Beirut. Research was carried out using desk audit, key informant interviews and archival research, which identified 21 potential dark tourism sites that could be incorporated into a new dark tourism product as part of the recovery of Lebanon as a tourism destination. Of these 21 sites, the majority were found in Beirut, suggesting that an urban dark tourism product may be the most suitable product to develop as the country emerges from crises. However, a number of barriers would need to be overcome in order for dark tourism to contribute to a form of phoenix tourism in the country, including the engagement of diverse stakeholders, the security of international tourists in the destination, and the ability of the public sector to invest in destination marketing in the post-crisis period.

Peacebuilding is often premised on international intervention in post-conflict situations. This epilogue extends the concept to address preventative peacebuilding in pre-conflict societies. Social movement organizations that spring from democratically oriented movements can either reproduce dominant and dominating leadership styles, or they can cultivate democratizing leadership (Klein, 2016) by developing democratic practices, structures, and cultures within and between organizations. Democratizing leadership promotes leadership as a verb more than a noun: as the operation of power in relationship between people, rather than as positional power grounded in an authority figure. In democratizing leadership, democratic decision-making is preceded by the development of individual and collective voice and followed by responsible collective action. In addition to these processes, democratic values are also essential, including: freedom (differentiated from autonomy), justice (procedural, social, and restorative justice), and equity (more than equality), which underlie structural processes and inform practices. When social movement organizations find creative tension between ad hoc leadership and the tendency toward bureaucratization, they can cultivate a democratic culture through organizational practices and structures for preventative peacebuilding work. Leadership in such organizations recognizes and utilizes creative conflict to sustain agonistic pluralism and promote conflictual consensus (Mouffe, 2013). This epilogue provides examples of democratizing leadership from social movement organizations, including: In the Heart of the Beast Theater, Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers, Neighborhood Leadership Program, and the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs, that illustrate how democratizing leadership can be developed in pre-conflict preventative peacebuilding organizations by integrating democratic practices, structures, and cultures.