For This Archipelago to Be Protected, Its People Must Come Home

Krish Seetah is on a mission to convince the United Nations that ocean conservation is inseparable from the repatriation of a forcibly displaced community.

The Chagos archipelago, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, was home to a thriving Chagossian community until the United Kingdom and United States governments forcibly removed them to make way for a military base in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, as international negotiations over the archipelago's future continue to unfold, Seetah is working to ensure the Chagossian people are not left out of the conversation a second time.

Seetah, an associate professor of environmental social sciences and oceans at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability, leads a Cultural Working Group of international organizations and governments who aim to center the Chagossian story while forming one of the largest marine protected areas in the world.

"It's important that we don't overshadow communities, populations, the people in our effort to protect nature, in our effort to develop policy," Seetah said.

The Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS) supports Seetah's work through its seed grant program — funding that made possible a novel research approach combining ethnographic fieldwork with AI-powered eye-tracking technology to build an evidence base for Chagossian repatriation.

Also a professor of anthropology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences, Seetah designed a methodology that pairs the intimacy of community interviews with the precision of scientific measurement. He showed participants a set of images of the islands while the eye-tracking device recorded where their gaze actually fell — and the results were not what he had expected.

One participant, Liseby Elysé — a prominent Chagossian community member who argued her case before the International Court of Justice — described the flora and fauna in the images before her. But the device told a different story: her eyes were continuously drawn to a picture of a cemetery.

"Subconsciously she was very much attached to ancestral connections to land," Seetah said. "We couldn't have anticipated those results."

Those results now form the backbone of a dossier for the United Nations — one that pairs ethnographic findings with scientific data to argue that the establishment of a marine protected area for the Chagos archipelago must be intertwined with Chagossian repatriation. A senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Seetah is working to ensure that argument reaches the right audiences.

"We are so proud to be involved with and supporting Krish Seetah's work," said IAJS faculty director Tomás Jiménez. "Krish's work is dealing with a type of migration that we don't typically think of when we think of global migration, and that is the return of a people to their homeland."

"It is a form of decolonization," Jiménez added. "What he is doing is making sure that when people come back to the Chagos Islands, they do in fact feel like they have come home."

And IAJS, Seetah says, fills a critical gap. “It provides the space — on campus, in the world — to do work that really focuses on repatriation, that really focuses on justice, social justice, and thinking about communities that have undergone decades of marginalization,” he said.

For Seetah, the work carries implications far beyond the Indian Ocean — a potential template for how displaced communities around the world might reclaim not just their land, but their future.

He is unequivocal about the cost of getting it wrong. "When you undertake science-based policy development without integrating people and their knowledge — without thinking about history, about colonial legacies — you might ultimately be causing harm," Seetah said. "When it comes to what a just Chagossian society in the future might look like, the key point is one that's guided by the Chagossians themselves.”