Three years ago, Natalia Riabkina watched as Russian soldiers marched through the streets of Zaporizhzhia, her hometown in eastern Ukraine. She recalls fleeing the city with her family, feeling frightened as they negotiated checkpoint after checkpoint while moving through Russian-occupied territory.
Today, Riabkina lives in Kyiv. She graduated from college last spring and is now applying for graduate programs in Canada, with a focus on either art management or Slavic studies. She recently began taking walks as part of her daily routine. It helps her process her trauma, she says.
“My family has lost so much,” she said. “Our city is occupied. We don’t have access to our home. My parents think it’s lost forever. We need to start over. Walking helps me think through what I’ve experienced.”
Riabkina learned to appreciate the soothing effects of a long walk this past July when she was part of a group of nine young women from across Ukraine who participated in a “peace walk” through Northern Ireland. The four-day walk was the inaugural iteration of a program established by two Yale World Fellows, Federica Du Pasquier and Leon McCarron, that aims to bring people together through the simple but transformative power of walking and talking through natural landscapes.
It’s so much easier to open up or discuss more difficult topics [while walking] than, say, sitting opposite a person looking directly at them.
“Conflict hardens people,” said Du Pasquier, a diplomat and lawyer who spent nearly a decade facilitating negotiations in conflict zones at the International Committee of the Red Cross. “Leon and I were keen to see what happens if we take people out of the environments that contribute to this hardening. We asked them to put away their phones and spend time walking together in nature. The idea is to give them the time and space to contemplate questions that relate to peace.”
Walking is inherently non-confrontational, said McCarron, a writer and hiking trail designer.
“You can walk alongside someone while in conversation, looking forwards, sharing the same direction and stride,” he said. “It’s so much easier to open up or discuss more difficult topics in this way than, say, sitting opposite a person looking directly at them.”
The walk in Northern Ireland was supported by the Yale International Leadership Center (ILC), which manages the World Fellows Program. The ILC, which is part of the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, is eager to seed initiatives started by its fellows, that contribute to addressing global challenges, said ILC Director Emma Sky, who joined McCarron and Du Pasquier in leading the peace walk.
Northern Ireland’s picturesque landscapes and history of conflict between nationalists, who are generally Catholic and consider themselves part of the nation of Ireland, and unionists, usually Protestant, who want to remain part of the United Kingdom, made the country an apt location for the walk, said McCarron.
“We wanted to walk through a beautiful landscape, and ideally a place with a variety of types of trails so that there were opportunities for participants to walk alongside one another or in groups at times, and at others to be challenged with trickier terrains,” he said. “Northern Ireland has all of this and, crucially, it also has its own story of conflict and peace.”
The walkers were joined by local people who shared stories of the history of Northern Ireland and the landscapes the group traversed.
While the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 largely stopped the violence between the groups, tensions remain in Northern Ireland, where people still grapple with big questions about identity and accountability, McCarron said.
“The country’s complexity makes it a useful place to have a peace walk, imbuing whole experience with the themes of what we’re there to discuss,” he said. “It also helps pose difficult questions about what peace means, including ideas of compromise.”
The walk’s organizers partnered with Brave Generation, a nonprofit organization focused on empowering young people to become Ukraine’s future leaders, to recruit and select participants.
The nine walkers come from different parts of Ukraine, the largest country by area located entirely within Europe. Eastern Ukraine has stronger historical connections to Russian culture while western Ukraine is more influenced by countries in Central Europe, such as Poland and Slovakia. Many eastern Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language. The bulk of the fighting has occurred in eastern Ukraine, where large swaths of territory are under Russian occupation.
“What attracted us to the intra-Ukraine framing is it allowed us to have a group of people walking towards a common goal both metaphorically and practically,” said Du Pasquier. “What does the future of Ukraine look like for people who come from both sides of the conflict-contact line. How can the future of Ukraine encompass the spectrum of their experiences of the conflict?”
The walk
The walk’s itinerary was designed with these differences in mind. Each day was centered on a specific theme drawn from input from the participants. These focused on language and religious differences between western and eastern Ukraine and hierarchies of trauma — the idea that people’s traumatic experiences are ranked according to their intensity, leaving some hesitant to discuss their trauma knowing that others have endured worse.
As they considered these themes, the group engaged with guest speakers who spoke to them about various aspects of The Troubles, the violent conflict that divided Northern Ireland for nearly 40 years, as well as topics concerning language and identity.
“Walking allows people to move between different conversations, both within a group, but also through those you meet,” McCarron said. “That was one of our aims: to encourage a mutual exchange between this group, and their experiences, and the people they met from the north of Ireland. This helps the project become more beneficial for everyone, and offers something to Northern Ireland, too.”
It was such a deeply human experience. We were helping each other as we hiked up the mountains and along the cliffs.
On the first day, the group hiked the clifftops of Northern Ireland’s Causeway Coast, which offered distant views of Scotland across the North Channel, to the Giant’s Causeway, a unique geological formation of more than 40,000 interlocking basalt cylinders created by volcanic eruptions millions of years ago and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That evening, they spoke with Isabel Stewart of the Wave Trauma Center, which provides services to people who experienced trauma during The Troubles.
The group visited the Giant’s Causeway, a unique geological formation of interlocking basalt cylinders.
The next day, the group journeyed along the Sallagh Braes cliffs to Glenarm, enjoying sweeping vistas over the Irish Sea. Author and cartographer Garrett Carr joined the group for a discussion on culture and identity. Linda Ervine, a Protestant Irish language advocate, discussed her efforts to reconnect people in Northern Ireland to Irish language across sectarian divides.
The group spent its third day in Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital city, where they learned more about the conflict and the Good Friday Agreement. They spoke with ex combatants from either side of the struggle and toured the city’s “peace walls,” towering barriers that separate predominantly nationalist Catholic and predominantly Protestant unionist neighborhoods.
On the final day, they hiked through the Mourne Mountains in County Down in the country’s southeast.
“Walking through the landscapes really brought us so close together,” Riabkina said. “It was such a deeply human experience. We were helping each other as we hiked up the mountains and along the cliffs. At the end, I felt I had known everyone for much longer than just four days.”
Building understanding
Riabkina credited McCarron, Du Pasquier and Sky for creating a trusting environment in which all of the participants felt comfortable sharing their perspectives and their stories. The experience helped her to process all that she has endured over the past three years, she said.
The program gave me the wider understanding that our differences among Ukrainians are actually our strengths.
“It really helped me to open up and discuss my trauma faster, which had been sitting inside of me for a long period of time,” she said. “I had compressed it very deeply. In Ukraine, you’re always thinking that your experience is nothing compared to people who live in Donetsk or Mariupol and other places where there has been so much death and destruction.
“I’m from an occupied city and I’ve seen lots of things, and those four days made me finally feel comfortable talking about these experiences.”
Participant Zlata Matsko enjoyed the scenery’s natural beauty and serenity.
“There were only normal planes in the sky, not war planes,” said Matsko, who is from Kharkiv, the largest city in eastern Ukraine that is a regular target of Russian attacks.
Matsko, who now lives in Lviv in western Ukraine, appreciated the opportunity to engage with other Ukrainians on issues of cultural identity.
“The program gave me the wider understanding that our differences among Ukrainians are actually our strengths,” said Matsko, who studies history at Ukrainian Catholic University. “Ukraine is very large, and Ukrainians have different experiences of the war and the country’s past. But I think those differences make us stronger and they are not something our aggressor can use against us.”
She brought home postcards.
“They remind me of the warmth I experienced in Northern Ireland,” she said.
The Ukrainian walkers explored questions regarding conflict and identity over the course of the four-day experience.
Anna Vietrova, who is also from Kharkiv, said she admires the people of Northern Ireland for ending the violence, but she questioned whether they had fully achieved a genuine peace.
“Walking through the streets of Belfast, and passing the peace walls, which form 30-meter barriers between communities, I just didn’t really see it at as true peace. It felt very fragile,” said Vietrova, who studies political science at Ukrainian Catholic University. “Stopping violence is a good starting point, right? But it felt like something was missing, like a big part of what peace means to me was missing there.”
The journey left her wondering what a just peace between Ukraine and Russia might look like, she said.
“When we talk about peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, we rarely define what peace means to us,” said Vietrova, who was a high school exchange student in Clever, Missouri, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. “How far are we willing to compromise. This is not a civil conflict as in Northern Ireland. It is a war of aggression from one country to another. To what point does compromise still look like compromise?”
Following this successful trial run, McCarron and Du Pasquier are in the planning stages for future peace walks in Syria and Iraq.
Du Pasquier prized the moments when the young women opened themselves up to new perspectives or expressed ideas that they previously would have repressed.
“That might sound small, but even a small opening to a different perspective is crucial to achieving peace,” she said.
On the final day, a participant told the organizers that she would leave Northern Ireland with a renewed sense of hope, Du Pasquier said.
“I think that’s all we could ask for,” she said.
