Cultural Heritage Boundaries and Typology of Peace Landscape

Tourism has been mentioned as a social force that can contribute and promote international understanding, cooperation and global goodwill for establishing and maintaining world peace. Heritage development suggests that tourism efforts can help to ease tensions and promote cross-cultural dialogue and reconciliation. Geopolitical border areas are dynamic, and their reality can change over time. Similarly, their heritage can also develop which in many cases revolves around social and cultural differences and contrasts with the other side of the border. The main aim of this paper is to examine and analyse the methods through which different types of geopolitical borderland heritage are expressed as peace tourism attractions in diverse international case studies. The three types and case studies discussed in this paper are: A. Closed conflict borderland: the Dorasan train station on the border separating South Korea and North Korea; B. Semi-open borderland and peace: The ‘Green Belt’ crossing Europe along the former ‘Iron Curtain’ between Western and Eastern European countries; C. Heritage and peace in supranational borderlands: The ‘For Europe’ Garden on the border triangle of Luxembourg, Belgium and Germany. The methodology selected is based on the naturalistic-qualitative approach of landscape interpretation by significance analysis of the three types of geopolitical borderland heritage in diverse tourism and peace attractions around the world.