KINGSTON, R.I. – Oct. 29, 2025 – University of Rhode Island Marine Affairs Professor and Director of Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Yoshitaka Ota was recently awarded the Taiwan Peace Fellowship, a fellowship that brings together leaders and scholars from around the world in Taiwan to gain a deeper understanding of the country’s historical and cultural context through dialogue and peacebuilding.

The Taiwan Peace Fellowship was launched earlier this year by the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation, which promotes civic engagement and global awareness among Taiwanese and Chinese youth. Ota—one of seven fellows chosen for the inaugural 2025 cohort—was invited to apply for the fellowship because of his work as the founder of Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus, a network of ocean researchers who work to advance ocean equity.

Ota highlights how different interventions can potentially pose risk to human security—an essential but often overlooked aspect of peace. Interventions with good intentions—for example, expanding marine protected areas (MPA)—tend to push the burden off Western nations and onto smaller or less-resourced nations, including through policies that designate larger percentages of the ocean as MPA along Pacific regions, where people may heavily rely on the ocean for sustenance and economic growth. Such governance structures and policies may not be suitable or aligned with a local community’s structure, creating conflict and causing harm or distress to less-privileged under-resourced countries.

“It’s not a linear chain reaction, but we always have an intervention which tends to protect the interests of those in power,” Ota says. “For me, that is more of the risk for peace if you consider peace as a human security. So Ocean Nexus is looking at governance in order to address those potentially harmful interventions.”

The fellowship cohort met in September for a three-week residency in Taipei, where they learned about Taiwanese history, current political pressures facing the country, and the public’s concerns regarding China and the threat to Taiwanese democracy. The cohort visited sites in Taiwan, met with policymakers, and attended lectures from Taiwanese scholars. In turn, each of the fellows visited different universities, each presenting lectures related to their field of work.

“I gave one lecture at Chung Yuan Christian University,” Ota says, “where we were given an opportunity to consider our work in the context of Taiwan. That was very meaningful. Rather than just going and giving a lecture, we first understood why we were presenting, why we were communicating to the media and talking with one another, and understanding the larger purpose of this fellowship.”

Taiwan carries a complex and difficult history of conflict and suffering, which Ota and the other fellows learned about through their interactions, visits, and lectures during the residency. When Ota was selected for the fellowship, he began reading books by the Taiwanese writer Lung Yingtai to gain a better understanding of Taiwan’s history and its relevance to her work behind the foundation. One of Yingtai’s books, Big River, Big Sea—Untold Stories of 1949, provides an ethnohistory of Taiwan during the Chinese civil war, a dark period of intense pain and suffering. Ota said the book taught him that “when national security or politics presents a broad banner of justice or goodness to the people, behind that banner is a conflict and behind that conflict is a people, ordinary people, who are suffering with so much pain, and this pattern repeats itself.” Yingtai seeks to inform people about the violence, suffering, and breaking of families that came at the cost of the nation’s freedom.

“What’s important is to understand the pain and violence and breaking of families that come at the cost of these big campaigns,” Ota adds. “Freedom and justice should really be on the side of the people and should never cost anyone’s life or pain.”

In discussions about peace, Ota notes, national security is often the priority, and human security gets left at the margins. He emphasizes the importance of centering people and their stories, suffering, and security, in order to truly bring peace and justice to a nation. It is important to understand “where the burden goes” when considering coastal communities in ocean equity, which is the central focus of Ota’s work and the Ocean Nexus mission.

Ota noted that the experience was deeply meaningful to him personally and professionally as a Japanese scholar reflecting on Japan’s colonial history in Taiwan.

“Taiwan was occupied by Japan for 50 years, and afterwards, there remained conflict,” he explains. “As a Japanese person, I felt obligated to be there and engage. Any time that I could speak publicly, it was important to me to acknowledge the impact of Japanese imperial colonialism and how it distorted and brought pain in Taiwanese history.”

By engaging with fellows from around the world—including a Venezuelan scholar working on refugee displacement and a Chinese theatre director advocating for storytelling over statistics—Ota says the fellowship illuminated the importance of shifting conversations about peace from a focus on national security to human security. As a Japanese scholar and one of the first cohort members, Ota says he feels a deep sense of responsibility to carry this work forward, continuing collaboration with his peers and the fellowship’s founder, Yingtai, to amplify the human stories often left out of traditional peacebuilding efforts.

This story was written by Yvonne Wingard, Communications Fellow in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences.