Goshen College history professor awarded Fulbright to study what makes for peace in Africa

GOSHEN, Ind. – “What kind of insights would we get about complex ethnic conflicts if we asked, ‘Why is there peace?’ instead of ‘Why is there conflict?’”

This is the question that Goshen College Associate Professor of History Jan Bender Shetler has been asking and for which she has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellows to spend three months in Tanzania and Ethiopia during the summers of 2007 and 2008.

“Within eastern Africa, Tanzania remains a model for peaceful coexistence,” said Bender Shetler, who is fluent in Swahili and has studied Amharic, “while Ethiopia presents a fascinating case where inter-communal peace has been largely maintained despite on-going civil wars over the past 30-40 years.” She will travel to Tanzania from the end of June through beginning of August 2007, and then spend the summer of 2008 in Ethiopia. She will work closely with the department of history at the University of Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa University and the Institute for Ethiopian Studies.

In Ethiopia, Bender Shetler will be looking primarily at Muslim-Christian relations. “Intercommunal conflicts are amazingly rare and short-lived,” she said. “Muslim fundamentalism has not found widespread or deep acceptance in Ethiopia.” Her research on Ethiopia began in the summer of 2006, while collaborating with Goshen College senior, Dawit Kebede, who is from Ethiopia, through the college’s Maple Scholars program. He has spent the past semester doing a peace studies internship in Ethiopia, providing some of the preliminary research for this project.

“I got the idea for this research while leading Study-Service Term in Ethiopia [in 2005], and was really intrigued by what we heard from talking to people about the Christian-Muslim relations in the country,” said Bender Shetler. Christians and Muslims make up the majority of the religious people in Ethiopia, and the two groups have lived together for a thousand years. In 1991, a new government took power and implemented a plan called “ethnic federalism,” dividing Ethiopia into nine different regions based on ethnicities.

In Tanzania, on the other hand, Bender Shetler will be looking at the peaceful coexistence between small ethnic groups, instead of religious groups. “No one group has been able to dominate the others,” she said. This study will build on her previous scholarship from more than a decade in the Mara Region of Tanzania. Bender Shelter has been working with the Luo historian Zedekia Oloo Siso and lived in Tanzania’s Mara region from 1985 to 1991 as a development worker with Mennonite Central Committee and the Tanzania Mennonite Church.

Bender Shetler’s goal is to explore the local foundations for peace in popular histories and civic associations within Ethiopia and Tanzania. Her research will build on the theoretical model of political scientist Ashutosh Varshney, of the University of Michigan, who asked similar questions in his investigation of Muslim-Hindu conflict in India.

“Research in studying peace will give us the tools to encourage local civil society associations that have the ability to prevent violence,” she said. Bender Shetler plans to primarily conduct her research through oral interviews with people in the communities of varied perspectives and experiences.

Bender Shetler, a 1978 Goshen College graduate who now teaches African and world history courses at Goshen, received her master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Florida. She received a Fulbright as well to do her dissertation research in Tanzania in 1995-96.

Bender Shetler’s commitment to Africa extends from her research into the classroom. “I am committed to showing students the local, cultural resources for peace, instead of reinforcing the idea that all the solutions for Africa are to be brought in from the outside,” she said. “I talk about Ethiopia and Tanzania as communities with strengths and resources to solve the problems they face, instead of always thinking that the problems have to be solved by outside ideas and resources. This hasn’t been emphasized enough.”

The questions Bender Shetler is asking suggest that the implications for this research could be broader than the two African nations she is exploring. “This kind of research is about how people living in the same community relate and live peacefully,” she said. “At what point do people commit violence against their neighbors? Are there associations that prevent violence? If so, shouldn’t we be supporting and encouraging those? We are testing how important those local associations are. If they are really important, this research may be relevant wider than Ethiopia and Tanzania.”

She also extends her thanks to those who have made this opportunity possible. “I am so grateful that they see the usefulness of this research,” Bender Shetler said. “Otherwise it would be nearly impossible for an American to do African research.” She also recognized Becky Horst, the college’s grants coordinator, for her role in getting the application prepared.

In May 2007, Ohio University Press published Bender Shetler’s new book, “Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present,” which is an environmental history about the people who have long occupied the Serengeti, five to six micro-ethnic groups who have inhabited the area surrounding the western borders of the park since 200 A.D., and how they have interacted with the environment.

The Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellows is designed to contribute to the development and improvement of modern foreign language and area studies in the United States by providing opportunities for scholars to conduct research abroad.

Editors: For more information about this release, to arrange an interview or request a photo, contact Goshen College News Bureau Director Jodi H. Beyeler at (574) 535-7572 or jodihb@goshen.edu.

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Goshen College, established in 1894, is a residential Christian liberal arts college rooted in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. The college’s Christ-centered core values – passionate learning, global citizenship, compassionate peacemaking and servant-leadership – prepare students as leaders for the church and world. Recognized for its unique Study-Service Term program, Goshen has earned citations of excellence in Barron’s Best Buys in Education, “Colleges of Distinction,” “Making a Difference College Guide” and U.S.News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” edition, which named Goshen a “least debt college.” Visit www.goshen.edu.