What does the word Rwanda evoke? What about Uganda, Bosnia, or Lebanon? If your thoughts turn to war, chaos, and suffering, you’re not alone. But Rwanda and Uganda are also among a handful of places in the world where tourists can see endangered mountain gorillas. Lebanon is home to breathtaking beaches and ancient ruins. And Bosnia has a storied multi-ethnic culture and excellent skiing.

All of these countries would like travelers to see just what they are missing. Increasingly, regions that were previously war-torn, suffering under brutal dictatorships, or simply off-limits to adventurers are trying to woo the curious with catchy slogans, promises of unspoiled coastlines, and, more often than not, a taste of the conflict that put these locales in the news.

Tour operators who specialize in such places say their business has grown in recent years, and the number of recreational visitors has increased everywhere from Rwanda to North Korea (see slideshow).

Using the slogan Discover a New African Dawn, Rwanda attracts about 37,000 tourists a year, compared with fewer than 2,000 at the beginning of the decade. The country saw an estimated 800,000 of its Tutsi minority killed by Hutus in about three months in 1994. But far from hiding the country’s brutal past, Rwanda’s tourism authority is encouraging visitors to bear witness to the destruction that was wrought.

One guide published by the tourism authority offers tour operators advice for “genocide-sensitive travel.” Rwanda’s mountain-gorilla tours routinely include stops at sites of awful slaughter, such as the hilltop memorial in Murambi—an exhibit at what was going to be a technical college that displays the bones of some of the 45,000 people massacred there—or Nyamata, a bloodstained church where as many as 10,000 were killed, its crypts now lined with skulls.

Rwanda’s long-range goal is to attract well-heeled tourists by offering them luxurious surroundings. But the country’s tourism success is part of an overall trend toward “tougher destinations,” says Tom Hall, a London-based travel editor for the Lonely Planet travel guides. “[We] see this reflected in our range of guides, which now includes Afghanistan and Algeria for the first time, and the number of tours visiting truly off-the-beaten-track destinations. Five years ago, few backpackers ventured into Laos, Nicaragua, Mauritania, Madagascar. Now these are well-established places to go.”

These travelers are seeking out an experience that’s more than a vacation: They’re looking for a chance to touch history, discover remote areas, and be physically and emotionally challenged. That’s increasingly difficult to find these days, when it seems every path has been explored. According to the World Tourism Organization, an agency of the United Nations, in the first quarter, global tourism was up 6 percent over the year before, with destinations like Subsaharan Africa showing especially strong growth.

Paul Lukacs exemplifies this new type of traveler. In Turkmenistan, the Los Angeles entertainment lawyer marveled at the many statues commemorating Saparmurat Niyazov, the country’s now-deceased dictator and “president for life.” In Sri Lanka, Lukacs witnessed a place in the grip of civil war. And in North Korea, he said, he glimpsed “one of the world’s few remaining unreconstructed command-and-control economies,” where blackouts are a daily occurrence.

“Why go to Barcelona when you can visit Ceuta or Melilla, the two Spanish enclaves in Africa?” Lukacs says. “When I travel, I want to be far away from my world, to see how differently other people live, to learn what traits are human constants and which ones are cultural color.”

Some tour operators offer trips to a host of post-conflict zones, interspersing visits to aid organizations and ruins with historic cities and nature preserves. For a little less than $20,000, including airfare from New York, Universal Travel System, based in Santa Monica, California, offers to take customers to just about every tragedy-laden country in East Africa.

After a stop in Burundi, a country that U.T.S. founder Klaus Billep describes as “not too stable” but “safe enough for two nights’ stay,” his tour continues on to Rwanda and Kigali’s four-star Hotel Des Mille Collines, which he notes was “the hotel they actually used in the movie Hotel Rwanda—the last safe place in the country.” Other stops on the itinerary include Somalia (the unstable backdrop for Blackhawk Down), Ethiopia (whose human-rights-challenged army is still fighting separatist insurgents), Eritrea (where a border conflict with Ethiopia has cost 100,000 lives), and Uganda.

Uganda, which was ruled in the 1970s by Idi Amin—nicknamed Africa’s Hitler—is now attracting tourism under the slogan Africa’s Friendliest Country.

Not all countries embrace their troubled past. Colombia, under a broad re-branding effort called Colombia Is Passion, has increased its tourism by 65 percent (nearly 1 million visitors) since 2002 by promoting its rich trove of pre-Columbian ruins, along with a 76 percent drop in kidnappings. Albania, using the slogan Albania, Europe’s Last Secret, is pushing itself as an inexpensive gateway to Mediterranean beaches and “snow-peaked mountains.” Little mention is made of its totalitarian past or the lawlessness and bloody feuds that followed when the country abandoned Communism in 1992.

Some countries are attracting interest without even being attractive or welcoming. A growing number of travelers want to visit North Korea, says Nick Bonner, whose China-based company, Koryo Tours, took more than 800 Westerners—including about 250 Americans, whose access to visas is limited by the North Korean government—there last year.

Those tours have grown by about 20 percent a year, Bonner says. His company recently introduced V.I.P. packages for more upscale clients, offering private meetings with Korean War veterans and performances by the country’s most accomplished musicians.

According to Lonely Planet’s Hall, “. . . recent conflict can have the unwarranted effect of improving a destination’s profile.” In El Salvador, former combatants in its brutal civil war offer tours of battlegrounds and rebel hideouts. And the notoriety conferred upon Bosnia and Herzegovina by the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s continues to drive much of the country’s tourism, despite the push to downplay the past.

Nature tours and skiing often play second fiddle to such sights as “sniper alley,” the stretch of road that ran from the center of Sarajevo to its U.N.-controlled airport, and the Sarajevo Tunnel Museum, which allows visitors to walk through part of the smugglers’ route into the formerly besieged city. Gina La Croix, an American-born lawyer who has lived in Bosnia since 2000, calls it one of the “must-sees.” She’s been there three times, always as part of a visit to family or friends.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has increased its number of commercial visitors from about 268,000 in 1997 to slightly less than 500,000 in 2006. The W.T.O. estimates the projected annual growth rate of tourism in the country at 10.5 percent, among the highest in the world.

“Places like Sarajevo and Mostar were unknown before becoming notorious in the conflict,” Hall says. “Today they attract travelers of all types—cultural visitors, adventure tourists . . . people go there looking for something different.”

Such interest is generally good for the people of these countries, providing hard currency and jobs. But in some cases, tourism remains tied to corrupt or authoritarian regimes. “We don’t favor sanctions on the tourism industry as a general rule, unless it can be clearly linked to the pocket of a dictatorship,” says Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch. “But you should educate yourself. Don’t go blindly.”

It’s doubtful, though, that everyone follows that advice. As bullets fly in the Sri Lankan government’s war against Tamil Tiger separatists, less than 60 miles away, “there are tourists on the beaches and in the capital,” notes Ron Haviv, a photojournalist covering the conflict. “The tourists are supporting the war funding, since the government is broke,” he says, adding that they either don’t know or don’t seem to care.