Peace Pathways

In spring of 2008, Swarthmore College student Reina Chano drove through the hilly Northern Ireland city of Derry—a key locus of the region’s infamous “Troubles”—and chuckled at her guide’s account of boyhood graffiti pranks, and at his habit of activating the childproof lock on her door as he did for his grandchildren. 

The conversational tone shifted dramatically, though, when her new friend confided that he wore a bulletproof vest because there were drug dealers in his impoverished neighborhood, and that a man he’d just introduced to Chano earlier that day had been a paramilitary group sniper.

A junior studying Catholic-Protestant tensions under Swarthmore’s Semester Abroad Northern Ireland program, Chano believed her U.S.-based studies had braced her for the notion that addressing political, ethnic, and religious conflict can be complicated, multifaceted, painstaking, and wrenching. 

“It’s an entirely different thing, however, to read about theory and another to directly experience and observe it,” says Chano, now a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was another thing entirely when I spoke to people whose families had been hurt or killed through the actions of a paramilitary group.”

When universities create peacebuilding and conflict-resolution degree programs, book-learning, lectures, and academic research can rarely compete with living in a conflict-torn region and befriending survivors of those conflicts. Whether it’s Swarthmore’s Derry-abroad program, the University of Rhode Island’s summer in Nepal, or the Southeast Europe abroad experience offered by Kosovo’s Universum University College, programs that bring students to regions they’ve only studied from afar can compel