As part of the "Colombian Peace Process," victim assistance programs, actions for the reincorporation into civilian life of ex-combatants, and demobilized persons of the armed conflict have been developed as well as innovative instances of intervention in cases of posttraumatic stress. In this study, we surveyed 143 community leaders from the Department of Atlántico (Colombia), participants in a program for capacity building in rehabilitation and mediation strategies. With a mixed design in which we combine the analysis of personal networks, psychometric scales, and qualitative interviews, we describe the use that community mediators make of their personal skills, their personal network, and social media in their actions to confront social trauma and promote coexistence in the local community. The results show a significant relationship between the density of personal networks and the psychological sense of community. Paradoxically, the high social cohesion of the communities of people displaced by political violence seems to pose objective difficulties in reducing trauma. In the discussion, we indicate that the sociogeographic segregation derived from housing policies becomes an obstacle to the effective functioning of the coexistence and reintegration programs of victims and demobilized persons of the armed conflict. In this context, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp are little used by community mediators in the development of their activities, which they perceive as reinforcing largely the dynamics of segregation of the displaced population.

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Community-based tourism represents an opportunity for sustainable socioeconomic development, helping local populations to emerge out of lower living conditions. This paper investigates the perceptions of tourists and stakeholders engaged in Community-Based Tourism (CBT) in Central Asian countries (including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) as an opportunity for sustainable development. This study’s purpose is to point out the usefulness of a combination approach of stakeholders’ and tourists’ perceptions to address the opportunities of CBT that can improve the quality of life of the tourism community in Central Asia by identifying the pitfalls of practices and determining challenges for tourism policy. Using a mixed-method approach, two complementary methodologies are simultaneously conducted. (1) An in-depth interview approach with sixteen selected experts in the region was processed with semantic network analysis for the definition of the main challenges and opportunities facing CBT as an enabler of sustainable development, considering the perceptions of sustainability from the point of view of stakeholders. (2) An online survey involving one hundred twenty-five tourists to the region was carried out to focus on tourists’ perceptions of sustainability. A structural equation modelling technique was used to identify the influence of tourists’ sustainability preferences and their involvement with local communities on sustainability perceptions. The results highlight the benefits the community receives, as well as future opportunities to obtain more advantages from tourism practices within the scope of sustainable tourism planning.

Marine protected areas provide cultural services including the aesthetic appreciation of the landscape and the performance of recreational activities. In this study, we use the photographs shared by users in a digital repository to describe the distinctive characteristics of two terrestrial-maritime natural parks in Spain. In total, 1041 photos and 2342 tags generated by 76 users were analyzed. The results show the greatest salience of the landscape values, followed by historical monuments and the sighting of fauna and flora. The methodology based on the extraction of digital data from Flickr facilitates the efficient comparison of a Mediterranean archipelago (Cabrera Island) with an Atlantic archipelago (Cíes Islands). However, some important limitations were also detected in the descriptive capacity of this method, in comparison with the content analysis by external observers. But, overall, the evaluation of the subjective experience of visitors to natural areas can be very useful for tourism management of the marine environment.

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