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Cultural heritage destruction, acts that are carried out by both state and non-state actors, have accompanied violence towards people in all types of wars throughout human history. Used as a means to cause terror and to directly perpetuate harm on a particular group of people, heritage destruction ultimately erases the history of the people and denies them a future at the same time. Heritage destruction, as such, is a topic that is directly relevant for conflict and peace economics. Yet, economics literature on heritage destruction, especially during epochs of violence is scant at best. Presenting some examples of heritage destruction during mass atrocities, this chapter discusses how heritage destruction is related to causes, conduct, and consequences of violence. Doing so illustrates how heritage destruction could be incorporated in extant conflict and peace economics studies and their relevance for post-conflict reconstruction and violence prevention.

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.

Despite being the intellectual foundation on which the notion of heritage is built and a critical element in all programmes aimed at heritage protection, interpretation as a concept and practice is not well understood or used.

The paper explores the reasons for and consequences of heritage interpretation as a concept and practice not being well understood using case studies within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) heritage arena in East Asia.

The paper shows how heritage interpretation impacts both positively and negatively on nation-building within states and the shaping of international relations between states. It identifies heritage interpretation approaches that might help to achieve reconciliation between peoples recently engaged in international conflicts. These concerns are not confined to East Asia but apply across the world.

The discussion draws together the three principal forms of heritage in UNESCO's global project: heritage places, protected under the World Heritage Convention; living or embodied heritage, safeguarded under the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention and documentary heritage preserved under the Memory of the World Program. Suggestions are made as to how the organizations and agencies charged with heritage protection should and could modify their interpretation policies and procedures to help remediate existing negative impacts and avoid creating new tensions in future.

This paper examines the implications, for States Parties, of the 1954 Convention safeguarding regime in the context of contemporary non-international armed conflict and ANSAs, with a general focus on the Middle East and in situ cultural property.

As the nature of conflict changes and armed forces become further engaged in supporting peacekeeping operations and deliver training to host nation security forces, and human security becomes an increasingly important function of military operations, the protection of cultural heritage (as an expression of a people's identity) becomes a significant contribution to individual operations.

International obligations to States Parties for the in situ protection of cultural heritage, under both International Humanitarian Law and HC54, become an ever increasing important responsibility for armed forces to help deliver.

While NATO is increasingly focussed on the defence of western states parties from threats posed by the Russian Federation, and observing a commercially and military assertive China, a recent report issued by the Pentagon noted that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is regrouping in Iraq faster than in Syria and could regain territory in six to twelve months in the absence of sustained military pressure.

Preservation in situ is used by heritage professionals to refer to the protection of a cultural heritage asset in its original location while the in situ protection of cultural property is a cornerstone topic of the 1954 Hague Convention Special Protection category. The Convention was drafted with international armed conflict in mind but the initial signatories to the Convention had sufficient foresight to consider non-international armed conflict and its potential effect on in situ cultural property by parties to the conflict, including Armed Non-State Actors (ANSA)

UN Security Council Resolution 2449 (December 2018) recognized the negative impact of the presence, violent extremist ideology and actions on stability in Syria and the region of both Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Al-Nusrah Front (ANF). This includes not only the devastating humanitarian impact on civilian populations but also the unlawful destruction of cultural heritage.

ANSAs comprise individuals and groups that are wholly or partly independent of State governments and which threaten or use violence to achieve their goals, such as Islamic State. As such, the military operating environment has changed since 1954.

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.

The destruction of armed confrontations – ranging from chronic armed conflicts to full-scale wars – leads to enormous loss of human lives and causes wide-scale devastation. They also leave deep and lasting traumas in the minds of those whose lives are torn apart because of a conflict. Memorialisation of conflict-affected sites plays an invaluable part in post-trauma recovery and can contribute to the reconciliation of different groups involved in a conflict as these sites are representatives of communities' collective memory, identity and a source of unity and resilience. This paper aims to investigate post-trauma recovery and reconciliation processes through the phenomena of memorialisation. It aims to answer how and if the memorialisation of sites of pain can contribute to the recovery and reconciliation of affected communities and serve as examples for other people around the world.

The documentation of such processes and the lessons learnt can offer valuable information for conducting similar exercises in other settings ravaged by a conflict. To achieve this, a review of literature on trauma, memory, memorialisation and difficult heritage was conducted, while the memorialisation processes from different cases such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1939–1945), Beirut (1975–1990) and Sarajevo's Vijecnica and Mostar Bridge (1992–1995) were analysed.

It was identified that the potential of memorialisation for post-trauma recovery and reconciliation is vast. However, if these processes can “heal” or “hurt” depend largely on who the stakeholders are; how the site and events are interpreted and presented; how pre/post-conflict relationships and dynamics are harnessed; how symbolic meanings (old and new) are [re]interpreted; the spatial-temporal nature of the site and those interacting with it; and the intended and perceived messages. Altogether, memorialisation of conflict-affected sites is a political and continuous process that should take into consideration all those directly and indirectly involved, the dynamics between them and all the symbolic meanings acquired and attributed to the site.

The study critically explores frameworks of memorialisation and their impact on both the built environment and communities. It contributes to the wider discussion of difficult heritage memorialisation and approaches to reflect on sites and cities emerging from crises such as conflict.

Given the complexity of a post-conflict environment, the restaurant sector needs to be analyzed not just from the economic perspective. This paper aims to identify the diverse macroenvironmental and managerial factors underlying restaurant failures in Lebanon. The authors hope that this effort may help increasing restaurant success rates in other post-conflict settings.

The aim of this paper is to explain how macroenvironmental pressures influence the restaurant business and which managerial factors are most critical in a post-conflict context. The authors adopted a qualitative method by conducting face-to-face, semi-structured interviews.

The findings show that restaurant failures in a competitive and uncertain post-conflict environment were caused mainly by a snowball of internal organizational factors related to bad management, poor human resource management policies, inefficiency and fraud. Internal organizational factors can all be associated with human mistakes and bad decisions, including excessive initial investment, expensive decoration, inability to manage monthly expenses, bad communication and market research.

This study contributes to the literature regarding restaurant failures in post-conflict regions and presents results that are expected to help managers in family- and non-family-owned businesses to enhance their decision-making process.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, giving a general overview of its urban context through five historical periods, as part of a research study on its modernist architectural heritage.

Designed to mimic the theatrical process which unfolds through acts and intervals, the paper combines literary, architectural, journalistic and historical sources, to sketch the key periods which characterise the city’s urban morphology.

The sequence of acts and intervals points to the dramatic historic inter-change of continuities and ruptures, in which the ruptures have often been less studied and understood. This explains the frequent conceptualising of Sarajevo through East–West binary, which synthesises it as a provincial capital from Ottoman and later Habsburg rule, a regional centre within two Yugoslav states and a capital city of a young state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This highlights the need to study the ruptures as clues to the flow of continuities, in which the care and after care for built environment provide a field of evidence and possibilities for diverse perspectives of examination.

Corroborated by secondary sources, the paper examines the accounts of urban heritage destruction in the 1990s war, as recorded by a writer, an architect and a journalist, and outlines a pattern of unbroken inter-relations between urban and architectural space (tangible) and sense and identity of place (intangible).

This discourse is relevant to the current situation where the city of Sarajevo expands again, in the complexity of a post-conflict society.

Challenged by the political divisions and the laissez-faire economy, the public mood and interest is under-represented and has many conflicting voices.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the accounts from the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, this conceptual paper contributes to the formulation of a cross-disciplinary discursive prism through which the fragments of the city and its periods come together or apart, adding, subtracting and changing layers of meaning of the physical space.

Over a century of state-sponsored construction of monuments, historic mythmaking and nationalist framings of WWI has ensured that it has become notoriously difficult to present the heritage of the Great War in an inclusive and non-selective way. In this paper the authors present a strategy and technology-driven solutions to overcome the selective heritage curation of modern conflict.

Building on a suite of tools, applications and cultural heritage management plans developed by the In Flanders Fields Museum (IFFM), this paper explores the challenges of preserving and curating conflict heritage. The authors investigate the philosophy, cultural heritage management strategies and exhibitions used to curate the heritage of the Ypres Salient (Belgium).

The paper argues that historical aerial photographs integrated in multimedia exhibits present themselves as a fascinating source bringing the landscape within the walls of the museum. Mobile augmented reality (AR) applications developed by the museum go one step beyond and bring museum techniques to the landscape.

This paper presents a strategy to present, manage and curate the entirety of conflict heritage from the modern period. Faced with growing politicisation and memorialisation of modern conflict, it is extremely important that inclusive heritage management and curation is insured. The reflections on different curatorial techniques used by the IFFM can contribute globally towards a better heritage engagement.

An innovative and meaningful framework enables a more historically nuanced visitor experience to key heritage sites throughout the Ypres Salient.

Ensuring a non-selective heritage experience is especially pressing today. Over the past century canonised and national narratives have prescribed our understanding of the First World War across Europe and beyond.

Adopting a critical stance towards the proliferation in AR apps and applying theories from anthropology and phenomenology has been developed combining AR with arboreal landscape relics.

Emerging from 20 years of violence and terrorism, the city of Medellin, Colombia, has used social transformation to improve civic culture, leading to a renaissance. The purpose of this study is to explore how social transformation can lead to urban transformation, forming the basis for sustainable, post-conflict tourism.

This case study is based on available descriptive data and direct observation supported by secondary sources.

The results of the research help to provide a better understanding of the conditions needed to develop and manage sustainable tourism in post-conflict environments. In so doing, it should be possible to make better policy decisions, with particular reference to social and urban interventions on planning, design and entrepreneurship.

The transformation of Medellin’s civic culture can be a model for destination with similar histories that present significant destination image and branding challenges – though each will take different paths.

This paper is one of the first on post-conflict tourism that analyzes the impact on a destination and country of internal turmoil due to narco-terrorism and insurgency over a lengthy period.