A new study led by Yale anthropologist Catherine Panter-Brick examines how stakeholders in socially diverse, conflict-affected societies conceptualize everyday peace, drawing on a comparative analysis across different groups of people. The findings offer insights that can inform peacebuilding policies and strategies across the globe.
For the study, Panter-Brick and her coauthors convened structured mapping sessions with different stakeholder groups — students, student refugees, diplomats, university professors, and community members — in Mauritania, a country in northwest Africa. Participants were asked to visually map factors they associate with “everyday peace,” reflecting how they navigate life in a socially divided context.
Their analysis, described in the journal Frontiers in Political Science, found clear differences in how different groups view pathways to everyday peace and where opportunities for systemic change may lie.
“One of the clearest messages from our work is that different groups view peace through different priorities, and those differences matter for peacebuilding policy,” said lead author Panter-Brick, the Bruce A. and Davi-Ellen Chabner Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. “Our comparison across groups shows where dialogue is needed most. You cannot identify meaningful change without first understanding where perspectives diverge.”
The study was conducted in Nouakchott, Mauritania’s capital and largest city. Nouakchott sits at the crossroads of the Maghreb, a region that stretches across western and central North Africa, and the Sahel, the semi-arid zone that spans the continent below the Sahara. Often described as politically stable, Mauritania nonetheless contends with regional insecurity, including the consequences related to persistent conflict and human trafficking in neighboring Mali and wider instability across the Sahel.
“Mauritania feels the pressures of regional conflict, migration, and economic change, yet continues to foster coexistence,” said Panter-Brick, who also directs the Conflict, Resilience, and Health Program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. “This makes it a valuable place to study how different groups reason about peace. People navigate ethnic diversity, historic grievances, rapid urbanization, and refugee inflows. In this context, it takes notable effort to sustain everyday peace.”
Listening across these perspectives revealed how peace is lived in everyday practice, rather than only how it appears in policy language, she said.
Viewed together, the maps form distinct ‘mental landscapes’ that show where people locate responsibility for sustaining everyday peace and enabling change.
Participants in each of the six stakeholder groups took part in mapping exercises that enable the visual representation of people’s local knowledge and modes of causal reasoning. In this case, they identified factors they saw as influencing their own definition of “everyday peace.” (As the authors note, everyday peace has been defined as the “actions and modes of thinking that people utilize to navigate through life in deeply divided and conflict-affected societies.”) Participants then represented these visually in a shared map. They also indicated the factors they felt mattered most.
Viewed together, the maps form distinct “mental landscapes” that show where people locate responsibility for sustaining everyday peace and enabling change. Mauritanian students framed peace in relation to system corruption, economic stability, ignorance, and insecurity, and reflecting a forward-looking focus on governance and opportunity. Refugee students mapped peace through the lens of war, centering personal security and freedom from fear grounded in lived experience of conflict and displacement.
Other groups located peace at different scales. Scholars emphasized a tension between everyday peace, good governance, and intolerance, while diplomats mapped a more complex system in which justice, safety, and regulation were tightly interconnected. Community members focused on the immediacy of everyday life: men emphasized family peace and secure income, while women gave added weight to community relations.
“Peacebuilding policies often rest on assumptions of shared priorities,” Panter-Brick said. “Our comparative analysis helps clarify those assumptions and shows where disconnects exist.”
The research team was invited to work in Mauritania through existing partnerships with the Diplomatic Academy of Mauritania, a government training institute for diplomatic personnel, and the University of Nouakchott facilitated by the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.
“This work highlights Mauritania as a genuine laboratory of peace: a space of cultural and ethnic diversity, social coexistence, and reflection on governance, situated at the heart of its Maghrebi and Sahelian environment,” said Abdelkader Mohamed Ahmedou, the former director general of the Diplomatic Academy of Mauritania.
The study was co-authored by retired U.S. Ambassador Bisa Williams, who is now a senior fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, along with Aicha Ebnou Abdem and Khadouj Dhehby of the Diplomatic Academy of Mauritania, and Yacoub Coulibaly and Taleb Bilal Eli of the University of Nouakchott.
The work was supported by a MacMillan International Research Grant, which funded the fieldwork and collaborative analysis.
