ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is to understand how tourism develops in a post-conflict context, what is the nature of the tourism offer, what type of market it looks to attract and to what extent destinations that have endured a long period of conflict can move beyond an early stage of post-conflict, often referred to as Phoenix tourism, to evolve into mature and normal tourism destinations. Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this author illustrates the sequence of changes that a destination may encounter post-conflict. Attention is also given to the role of dark tourism, how this is presented within the destination region as a whole and also how this is manifested at the scale of individual communities in how the era of conflict helps define their tourism product development, especially around murals. The case study also helps to outline the extent to which destinations coming out of conflict can develop their tourism, which moves beyond the Phoenix stage to resemble that which is viewed as ‘normalization’ within conflict-free destinations. Prior to discussing the case study, attention turns to a wider discussion of what is meant by post-conflict tourism development.
