Recently, while the U.S. teetered on the brink of a war with Iran and North Korea, and struggled with one of the most contentious internal political divides in its history, our team of researchers traveled to Mauritius, a small island off the coast of Africa, to study peace. The research is part of the Sustaining Peace project at Columbia University’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4).
Learning what it takes to live in peace seems relevant, urgent even. Violence feels ubiquitous in the United States, in New York, and in the neighborhood where I live. Tessa Majors, a young girl studying at Barnard across the street from my office at the Earth Institute, was recently murdered, making national headlines. Yeyo, a 27-year-old whose name I only know from the altar erected on the place he was shot, was murdered across the street from my apartment a few weeks earlier. His name did not make even the article about his death in the local neighborhood paper that covers Washington Heights. Mass shootings have occurred in places of worship and schools across America, and movements like Black Lives Matter and #metoo are but a few examples highlighting the many injustices faced by certain groups in this country. Neo-Nazis are on the rise and making headlines, politics are becoming bitterly partisan, and disparities often fall along group divides. In this climate, it feels important and necessary to learn from places that are peaceful, to understand what peace looks like, feels like, and how it is achieved and sustained.
Mauritius is a small island nation in the Indian Ocean off of Madagascar. It is green and lush with dramatic jagged mountains that look folded out of origami. Originally an island uninhabited by people, it was colonized first by the Dutch, then the French, and then the British to grow sugar. Colonizers brought slaves from Madagascar, and later indentured servants mainly from India to work the plantations. Traders from communities in China and India later moved to the island. Descendants from these groups and waves of guest workers and expats from Bangladesh, China, and South Africa have made Mauritius home to a diverse mosaic of languages, ethnicities, religions, and cultures.
With ethnic riots in the 1960’s and 1990’s, Mauritius has not always been a harmonious multicultural society, but it is currently one of the more peaceful countries of the world. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, it is one of just four countries free from both ongoing domestic and international conflict. Mauritius is the highest ranked African country on the Global Peace Index, and is classified as Very High on the Positive Peace Index. These indices look at indicators such as levels of political instability and the prevalence of bribes. Mauritius has a full democracy and is also highly ranked for both economic development and political freedom.
The Sustaining Peace Project team is led by Peter T. Coleman, executive director of AC4 at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and coordinated by me, Allegra Chen-Carrel from AC4. In partnership with local multiculturalism researcher Naseem Aumeerally at the University of Mauritius, we conducted field research in Mauritius in December seeking to better understand the factors contributing to peace, some of the local challenges to peace, and the ways these challenges are addressed on the islands.
As interviews and focus groups highlighted, Mauritius is peaceful, but it’s no utopia. Current economic inequities along group lines remain legacies of the nation’s history of slavery; LGBTQ people often live in fear of exposure; and despite the country’s image as a happy multicultural cluster of islands, intergroup tensions do exist. We heard stories of interracial couples facing such discrimination they left the country, stories of the ways hierarchies such as caste and class often silently divide groups, and repeatedly heard the peace in Mauritius described as “fragile.” People were eager to discuss challenges, or what one research participant described as the “other side of the postcard.”
And yet.
There is little debate that Mauritius is relatively peaceful. There is a strong social safety net and the government recently conducted a Truth and Justice Commission to examine and address the legacies of slavery and indentured servitude. There are no guns, cultural norms encourage avoiding confrontation, and stories of bridging religious and cultural divides abound. As one focus group participant explained, “It is not my mother only who has brought me on Earth, but a doctor has helped her and this is maybe someone of another faith. So we are all together.” Ordinary positive day-to-day connections with others from different backgrounds help to create a multicultural social fabric. Many people recounted neighbors bringing over little cakes when celebrating various cultural holidays — Diwali, Christmas, Chinese New Year, and after sundown on Eid al Fitr, highlighting the interpersonal practices that form the micro-politics of peace.
As we return from fieldwork, and begin coding data from interviews and focus group discussions to explore what Mauritians see as central to creating and maintaining peace, one thing is clear: the peace in Mauritius is highly complex. It springs from many historical and contemporary sources — from its many peoples and traditions, their homes and neighborhoods, to its policy-makers in Parliament and places of worship. And it is replete with contradiction. As one participant said, “Mauritius is highly complicated but peaceful, whereas (South) Africa is simple but dangerous.”
Our next step is to use these qualitative findings to construct a survey which we will distribute to a nationally representative sample to help evaluate the broader population’s perceptions of issues relevant to the nation’s levels of peace and conflict. We will also scrape data from news articles to find patterns in the language and framings to assess levels of peacefulness.
The Sustaining Peace Project plans to use similar methodologies to study other peaceful countries such as Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Norway, exploring the different ways peace manifests across the globe. What is clear is that it is important to not only focus on war and murder, scarcity and injustice, but also to study what is working. In this historical moment where conflict and violence feel ubiquitous, we could certainly stand to learn from places that have managed to nurture different forms of peace.
I’m a Mauritian. A fifth-generation indo-mauritian, born and bred there, left the country at age 19 for my studies in France in 2009 and currently working as a lawyer in Paris.
I was quite taken aback by the article both because of the caricatural dismal portrayal of american society and the lack of knowledge on Mauritius.
Mauritius is of course one of the most peaceful countries in the world. That said, the author, despite being a teacher doesn’t use statistics but anecdotal examples to make her point. She cites two examples of shootings in New York as examples of how the US is less peaceful. What about a more serious analysis by comparing the crime rates between the two countries? What about the homicide rates per thousand inhabitants? These would give a more accurate picture for comparison.
The author also gives examples of other forms of violence in the US giving rise to movements like BlackLivesMatter and MeToo. Does she seriously believe that racism and sexism don’t exist in the Mauritius? Or that they occur in a lesser degree? That only blacks face racism or that blacks are only victims and never themselves racists? Again she furnishes no statistics for comparison.
As she made broad claims with no real data, allow me to do the same.
First and foremost, she should have started with the specificities of Mauritius. We are an insular country with no land border with a neighbour country. That prevents conflicts across the border from spilling into our land. Given our isolation in the middle of the Indian Ocean, we have also not been touched by waves of refugees fleeing conflict who usually import their own conflicts to their host countries.
Secondly, let’s speak about the elephant in the room.
Mauritius is the only Hindu majority country in Africa.
Mauritius is also, according to the UN, the only country in Africa to be a “real” democracy
Coincidences don’t exist.
The Hindu majority provides political and communcal stability. The Hindus of Mauritius never tried to impose Hinduism as state religion, no proselytisation is done by Hindus and other religious groups are free to practice their faith.
At the same time, the Hindu majority ensures that the laws remain secular and has repeatedly fought off demands from Muslims to implement Muslim Personal Laws compliant with Shariah.
Thirdly, economic prosperity coupled with a reduction in inequality helped avoid social tensions. Social mobility is another important factor. In Mauritius, schools still play their roles to help rise up the social ladder and someone from a poor background can still rise up thanks to a meritocratic school system.
All this reminds me of a textbook in my French Language class back in 2005. It was written by Linley Couronne, a French secondary school teacher and former president of Amnesty Mauritius. In one of the chapters speaking of prejudices, he wrote,
“In Mauritius, there are five main communities and each one is subjected to a prejudice. Hindus are seen as misers, Whites are seen as racists, Chinese are seen as dishonest, Muslims are seen as fanatics and Blacks are seen as lazy”
He summed things up very well. In everyday life, these five clichés organise inter-communal lives. And as all clichés, they are mostly based on some truth even more so when you realise that these clichés are universal everywhere around the world against the same groups.
The author mentioned neo-nazi groups in the US. We have our own equivalent in Mauritius – Islamists.
Despite representing 17.2% of the population, Muslims are very vocal on implementing their religious laws and those most affected by their fanaticism are sexual minorities.
In 2017, the Gay Pride was disrupted when 300 raging Muslims took to the streets shouting death to homosexuals.
The video is still online
https://actu.orange.fr/monde/videos/ile-maurice-des-islamistes-contre-une-marche-lgbt-CNT0000019Hb83.html
Even if the author spoke about homophobia, being an american, whe looks at things from an american view. She couldn’t muster the courage to say that the homophobia prevalent in Mauritius mostly comes from one community as criticising Muslims is politically incorrect in western academia. The truth however doesn’t change.
As their study is ongoing, I would advise the author and her colleagues to put their blinkers away and analyse things not by comparing with the US but by learning more about Mauritius. And they should make sure to choose their local source of information well. Associations and vocal groups are barely representative of the countries they are in. She should speak more to the common men and women and not restrict herself to the cities.
Just look at things and listen. We are peaceful because we are good mannered, that doesn’t prevent us from having disparaging views on other mauritians and vote accordingly during elections.
I understand that her views on Mauritius come from various focus groups (students and all major ethnic groups) and interviews of Mauritians.
The issues that you mentioned were all brought up in the discussions. I think that what the author of this article meant is that despite the tensions bubbling in our society, we somehow manage to live peacefully with each other.
The research is still going on, and as she writes:
“Our next step is to use these qualitative findings to construct a survey which we will distribute to a nationally representative sample to help evaluate the broader population’s perceptions of issues relevant to the nation’s levels of peace and conflict. We will also scrape data from news articles to find patterns in the language and framings to assess levels of peacefulness.”
The planned research is “to use these qualitative findings to construct a nationally representative sample. it is important to remember that if the follow up research is based on faulty and/or biased data in the original study , without corrections for that bias any follow up research will potentially continue those biases and mistakes.
I know almost nothing about Mauritius but it is always important to be sure that research, especially qualitative social science research, isn’t automatically assumed to be without bias.
Very well said. Kudos to you from India.
Thank you for sharing insights on Mauritius and your team’s global approach to understanding peace. Although, it is clear that each country faces it’s own difficulties and that no place on earth is perfectly at peace, in these times off heightened insecurity, any insight we may arrive at to understand how we can live in better harmony with one another is very refreshing!
I am originally from Sweden where I grew up in the fifties and sixties. I met my Mauritian husband when I was less than 18. We lived many years in England. I was always struck and impressed by how sensitive he was not always to what people said but rather to how they felt. Later, when I came to live in Mauritius myself, I understood that this is very generalized characteristic born precisely out of the fact of the many cultures, creeds and religions that have gone into the melting pot that is Mauritius now. Everyone realizes that conflict in one if the world’s most densely populated countries would be a catastrophe for generations to come.