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There have recently been concerted efforts by many post‐conflict African countries to formulate and implement policies and measures that will reconstruct and develop their societies. Much of the discussions of realizing post‐conflict reconstruction and development have generally focused on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of ex‐combatants. What is however, missing is a discussion on capacity development and capacity building initiatives to help in reconstruction in the period after DDR. This paper therefore examines the importance of capacity development in post‐conflict African environment. It notes that while demobilising and disarming warring factions is important, the success of reconstruction efforts in a post‐conflict environment depends largely on the ability to build and develop capacity and skills that are pertinent to helping reconstruct and promote the development goals of the countries. It is argued that post‐conflict societies should have a coherent and co‐ordinate approach to rebuilding, reconstructing and developing the capacity of the state in order to achieve the state’s legitimacy and effectiveness. Such capacity development measures should involve the development of physical infrastructure; the building of the state’s institutional structures; the promotion of good political and economic governance; skills and education training for individuals; and measures to improve and deliver security and social services.

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.

Post conflict housing reconstruction is crucial to development and peacekeeping. However, the success of it, is hindered by a number of problems related to a lack of addressing housing needs. The purpose of this paper is to explore how such housing needs can be effectively managed in post conflict housing reconstruction in Sri Lanka.

Using the grounded theory method as the research strategy, unstructured interviews were conducted with policy makers, practitioners, beneficiaries and academics in Sri Lanka. Data were analysed using open, axial and selective coding to develop the theoretical framework.

The study reveals the challenges, contributing factors and strategies in addressing housing needs of accessibility, habitability, affordability, location, facilities, cultural considerations and security of land tenure. It also identifies the gaps and recommendations. The paper establishes the links between these and presents a theoretical framework for managing housing needs effectively in post conflict housing reconstruction in Sri Lanka.

This research enhances the success of post conflict housing reconstruction through addressing housing needs effectively, which contributes to sustainable housing development after conflicts.

The study combines the literature from five main areas: conflicts, post conflict, post conflict reconstruction, post conflict housing reconstruction and housing needs and provides a better understanding on how the housing needs can be managed during post conflict housing reconstruction in developing countries based on empirical evidence.

Conflict environments are under researchers’ scope in many disciplines at micro and macro levels. This paper aims to steer towards finding out how literature addresses entrepreneurship in conflict contexts. In addition, this paper tries to ascertain the theoretical bases and main themes and issues that have been studied in this area, to map the current knowledge in a clear frame as an attempt to highlight gaps and weaknesses in relevant literature.

Review entrepreneurship, conflict and post-conflict literature including the terminologies, theories, methodologies are the main themes. The primary sources of data are research articles that were published in scholarly journals and written in English. The paper includes, in the final list of reviewed articles, 57 articles.

The review reveals three main themes of the special definition of entrepreneurship in conflict areas. Many gaps remain, despite the growing interests. More involvement in collecting data directly from the area under conflict is required instead of the heavy dependency on secondary data. In addition, destructive business and conflict consequences have promising research issues to be discovered more in single places or collectively for broader comprehensiveness. These findings may assist researchers, policymakers and international bodies to approach the current literature and build farther on it.

This paper attempts to provide a mapping of literature that focuses on how entrepreneurship in conflict and post-conflict could differ or be similar to stable contexts. The findings advance motivation for future empirical studies to encompass issues and development of entrepreneurship orientation, taxonomies and impacts in conflict and post-conflict contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the contribution of grassroots (mostly informal) businesses to post‐conflict, socio‐economic development in Liberia.

The research findings are based on quantitative data from a survey of 1,823 grassroots business owners from the central region of Liberia and qualitative data from 48 key informant interviews and 22 focus groups.

Grassroots businesses ensured access to goods and services in remote towns and villages, a key component of post‐conflict development. Although they were usually profitable and had high loan repayment rates, inadequate loan opportunities undercut their contributions to private sector growth and capacity development.

This research points to the contribution of grassroots businesses to post‐conflict social and private sector development, a relatively unexplored area of research in Liberia. The study reveals how grassroots businesses provide needed goods, services, and livelihoods in inaccessible parts of Liberia. This research can be used by government and non‐governmental organization to contribute to improve the economic situation for grassroots businesses in Liberia.

Capacity development in fragile environments in Africa has often proven to be a complex undertaking. This has largely been because of existing knowledge gaps on what exactly causes fragility of states, the economy and society. The liberal peace development model that generally informs post‐conflict reconstruction and capacity development has a limited conception of fragility by narrowly focusing on the national dimensions of the problem, promoting donor‐driven solutions, emphasizing minimal participation of beneficiary actors in the identification and prioritization of capacity development needs, and by subcontracting the design and management of projects and programs. The resulting capacity development impact has generally been disappointing. In the absence of homegrown strategic plans, stakeholder participation and ownership, international development partners have all too often addressed capacity gaps by financing training, supply of equipment and professional exchanges of parliamentarians and parliamentary staffers. These efforts usually achieved their presumed number targets but tended to ignore addressing the larger issues of political economy within which capacity development take place. However, the recent re‐conceptualization of parliamentary capacity development as a development of nationally owned, coordinated, harmonized, and aligned development activities seems to be gaining growing attention in Africa. As the experience of Rwanda eloquently demonstrates, capacity development is essentially about politics, economics and power, institutions and incentives, habits and attitudes – factors that are only partly susceptible to technical fixes and quantitative specifications. These structural factors have to be negotiated carefully and tactfully.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the structural factors responsible for why “donor darling” has not changed the pitfalls of stagnation and lifted post‐conflict Sierra Leone out of poverty.

The study adopts a bottom‐up approach (“through the eyes of the poor”) and a combination of primary and secondary research methods – substantial desk research to investigate and review documentation related to the project and field interviews with development stakeholders at the national, district, and community levels with humanitarian aid workers, local civil society organisations, international non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) and national government officials.

It is argued that aid without the necessary local institutional structure for effective coordination and stringent aid conditionality – and therefore narrow focus – has stifled sustainable socio‐economic development initiatives. The international community's narrow definition and support for liberal peace, in tandem with the overarching neoliberal economic paradigm and failure to embrace an inclusivist approach to peacebuilding, has further stonewalled effective reconstruction, growth and development.

The paper calls the attention of development NGOs to be self‐reflexive, “wear native spectacles”, coordinate their actions and avoid “development as dependence”, by prioritizing what matters most to the beneficiaries of development. The basis of effective and sustainable socio‐economic development is institutional building.

This chapter critically analyzes the outcomes of a legal reform enacted in Bali to address unintended consequences of a World Bank policy that undermined women’s economic, legal, and human rights.

This qualitative exploratory inquiry employs ethnographic data including participant observations and 18 interviews conducted in Denpasar, Bali.

The analysis suggests that policy measures intended to empower women which fail to address the influence of gender in the formation and functioning of social institutions reinforce conceptualizations of gender that constrain women’s autonomy and reify patriarchal sociocultural institutions.

Conceptualizations of gender in post-conflict research have lagged behind the richness of theories pertaining to gender as a social structure. Incorporating analyses of gender ideologies into the research phase of policy development will bridge this gap between theory and application.

Calls for women’s empowerment in the wake of the collapse of central governance structures, such as in the Arab Spring, must be accompanied by attention of feminist researchers and activists ensuring that policy measures intended to address barriers to women’s equality move beyond conceptions of empowerment that privilege economic capital. Dominant frameworks employed by microcredit programs and legal reformers emphasizing economic independence without attending to structural causes of women’s marginalization run the ironic risk of more deeply entrenching harmful social institutions.

This project allows women’s voices to reciprocally transform social theories and practices, contributing to understandings of the influence of gender in legal reform efforts and gender as a social structure.

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.