2025 Religion and Foreign Policy Workshop

FASKIANOS: Thank you all for joining us for the sixteenth annual Religion and Foreign Policy Workshop. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.  

The Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy program is dedicated to being a resource for faith leaders and policymakers, and offers a forum for congregational leaders, seminary heads, scholars of religion, and representatives of faith-based organizations to discuss global issues in an interfaith environment. 

The Religion and Foreign Policy Workshop is made possible in part through the generous support of the Ford Foundation.  

We’re delighted to welcome you all with us tonight. We have in person representing twenty states plus Washington, D.C., the United Kingdom, and Sri Lanka. We have an excellent lineup of panels covering issues including peace building and reconciliation, international religious freedom, and global hot spots, as well as discussion groups on a variety of topics. 

And just a few reminders for the workshop. Please silence your mobile devices so we don’t hear the pinging and interruptions during the discussion. During the Q&A portion, please stand and wait for a mic from a CFR team member, and state your name and affiliation before asking your question. This is particularly important because we are livestreaming these discussions, so we want people joining us via livestream to be able to hear your questions, and we will be posting the video and transcript after the fact at CFR.org.  

There is a prayer room on the second floor in the conservatory which will be open for your use throughout the workshop and CFR team members can direct you there. So now to the meat of the evening.  

Our opening panel this evening on sustaining bipartisan religious engagement in U.S. foreign policy will feature Samah Norquist, Melissa Rogers, Knox Thames, and Peter Mandaville. We will have dinner after their conversation at which point you can indicate your dietary preferences to the servers.  

Reverend Mark Fowler, CEO of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, will deliver our dinner blessing. So with that, I invite our distinguished panel to the stage. Please join me.  

Peter Mandaville will be moderating tonight’s discussion. Dr. Mandaville has dual appointments at George Mason University and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. He served as director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and as senior advisor for faith engagement at USAID—U.S. Agency for International Development.  

And with that, I will leave it to him to introduce our distinguished panel and I yield the floor to you.  

Thank you, Peter. 

MANDAVILLE: Wonderful. Thank you so much. (Applause.) 

Good evening, everyone. Irina, thank you so much for the introduction.  

Many of you are aware that over the last two decades the United States government has tried to more systematically engage and work with faith actors and religious communities in its efforts to promote religious freedom around the world and in much of our diplomatic and development work. 

We thought that it would be interesting to begin this year’s workshop with an exploration of where that work stands two decades on and I can’t think of a better group of panelists to join me in that discussion.  

Obviously, we are meeting, as we all know, at a time of enormous upheaval in Washington, D.C. Much of it has touched spaces relating to U.S. diplomacy and particularly the development work and foreign assistance, and everyone on this stage has had some contact and been involved in that work and will be an invaluable guide to helping us make sense of what we’re currently seeing.  

Their full biographies are available in your programs but I will briefly introduce them mainly in connection with the roles that they played in U.S. government related to religious freedom promotion and religious engagement.  

Samah Norquist served in the first Trump administration like me at the United States Agency for International Development as the agency’s chief advisor for international religious freedom, working directly to support administrator Mark Green in that work.  

We’re also joined by Melissa Rogers who served as the director of the White House Faith Office in both the Obama and Biden administrations. I know that many of you are here because of your interest in foreign policy and international issues and because many of your organizations and institutions have been valuable partners in the work that the U.S. government has done.  

But, of course, many of you have very close organic connections to domestic religious communities around the country and so I think it’s going to be very helpful to hear from Melissa about the intersection between developments on the home front and the international side of religious freedom promotion and religious engagement.  

And, finally, we have my good friend of many years standing Knox Thames who has served in positions—senior positions at both the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as well as the State Department as a special advisor for religious minorities in the Near East and South Central Asia.  

Between us we have served across multiple administrations, Democratic and Republican, across multiple agencies—USAID, State Department, the White House, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, other public institutions involved in this work such as the U.S. Institute of Peace—and so I’m really looking forward to our conversation tonight. 

I’d like to begin by asking each of you to reflect on the work that you’ve done at the intersection of religion and U.S. foreign policy, diplomacy, and development, some of the kind of main takeaways that you’d want to share with our audience in terms of how that work has gone, what’s worked well—you know, what’s been more challenging and then, of course, as we’re all observing the rapid pace of developments around U.S. foreign policy in so many regards and on so many fronts right now any initial reflections and thoughts you have there. 

Samah, could I maybe start with you?  

NORQUIST: Sure. Good evening. Thanks for the Council on Foreign Relations for having this. 

This is a really exciting opportunity to talk about some of the work that we’ve done during the first administration but let me give you a quick background about myself and why I have been interested in this field.  

I am an immigrant. I come from Palestinian origins. I came to this country at the age of sixteen. I’ve been interested in international relations since college. I did my master’s on the role of religion in formulating foreign policy, and then I came to D.C. and 9/11 happened. And as a Muslim American and as an Arab American who works in the—who’s part of the center right Republican Party that was a huge experience for me but it was an opportunity for me to make allies and learn and teach and educate people.  

I realize that sometimes the American people just feel isolated or away, that the other world is away. And things changed on 9/11, and it became sort of a personal responsibility for me to represent my faith. And those hijackers did not represent my faith. 

And the journey kept going on. I worked at USAID during the Bush administration 43 working on a very similar portfolio. It was the public diplomacy towards the Muslim world. That was the big portfolio.  

Fast forward, I got the opportunity to serve in the Trump administration. I got lots of criticism from, you know, members of community, friends, about how could you, and my first response was this is an incredible opportunity to serve the president of the United States, the American people, and this homeland.  

As a Palestinian I’ve never held any citizenship until I became a U.S. citizen. I was eighteen when I was—when I became a citizen. I was never able to vote anywhere. I did not have any rights anywhere. So despite some of the challenges in—when it comes to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that never shaped my thinking and moving forward.  

So when the opportunity came I jumped on it and decided that it was around the time that ISIS committed persecution in Iraq and Syria and it was my fight, again, to bring a different picture for those people that hijacked my faith and in the name of the faith killed so many people that I grew up with or people like the ones I grew up.  

So that’s how it started and it just fell on my lap, and I was privileged. I never took it for granted. I never take being an American for granted because it is a privilege for me as someone who comes from a background that I couldn’t be a citizen anywhere.  

So that’s my journey. (Applause.) 

MANDAVILLE: Great. Thanks so much, Samah, and it’s really, really moving to sort of hear about how your personal background and that direct experience of coming to this country and finding a sense of rights holding for the first time have directly informed and inspired your desire to serve our country.  

Melissa, can we turn to you now and invite sort of your own reflections on that journey?  

ROGERS: Sure. Well, I want to echo the thanks to the Council on Foreign Relations and Irina and her terrific staff here for keeping this tradition going, for bringing us together year after year to have these conversations which are so fruitful, and also thank my fellow panelists and everybody here. It’s great to see so many old friends. I’m looking forward to the conversation. 

So I grew up a Baptist from, you know, just childhood, and Baptists are always taught in my community that we have to defend religious liberty for everyone in equal measure, and that’s a theological precept, not just a legal or constitutional one.  

So I was brought up in that atmosphere and wanted to become a lawyer from a young age and did go to law school, but never thought I’d be able to combine my interest in law and religion in my work—my professional work, and but, lo and behold, I did find the Baptist Joint Committee for Public Affairs, as it was called at the time, where I started working as a pro bono attorney there and found that I could combine these two great loves of mine. 

The way I ended up in government service, which was a complete surprise to me, was that I started working with some folks as the election happened between—when President Obama was running for president, and one of the questions on the table was President George W. Bush had established for the first time this White House Office of faith-based and what is called community initiatives at the time.  

And so the question was who—you know, what should the person who won the next presidential election do with that office. And so along with my friend and colleague E. J. Dionne we wrote a paper about what the next administration should do with this office. We ended up recommending that they keep it and that they do certain—you know, build on certain successes the Bush administration have had, make certain reforms.  

And so that brought me into conversation with then candidate Obama and then brought me ultimately into the administration during his second four years to run that office. Much to my surprise it was a great opportunity, as you said, one you couldn’t turn away, but never was one that I expected to have. 

So that also—then I got to know then Vice President Biden and became—then he called me to come back into the White House when he was elected so. 

And the job in the White House is several-fold. One is to lead the White House Office—as it’s called during the Obama and Biden years the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, as well as the agency Centers for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. I know many of you have worked with this network and, of course, Peter led the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at USAID during the Biden-Harris administration.  

So that’s one wonderful piece of work and incredible continuity across the two—now I would say three administrations, and let me just pause there and say, you know, to appreciate the fact that when President Obama came to the White House I think we all knew that it would be exceptionally unusual for a president of a different political party to continue an office at the White House that was the signature initiative of his predecessor. 

But he decided this would be a really good way to keep continuity in the country, to build common ground, and so I think across all my time in government what I found through that office is this long tradition that actually far predates, as most of you know, even the George W. Bush administration, going back into the nineteenth century of government partnering with faith-based and community organizations to serve people in need both in our own country and around the world has been something that’s been longstanding, bipartisan, and really productive.  

And, of course, it took hold because government struggles sometimes to connect with people that are really suffering, some of the most vulnerable people. But faith-based—many faith-based and community groups excel with that and excel at working with government.  

And so it’s a rich area where people can come together when they have many different policy differences and yet work together to serve people in need, and so it’s been a real sweet spot over the years.  

I’ll just mention very quickly the two other areas that are really important that I also worked on which is advising on policy issues of church, state, and religious freedom in the domestic sphere but sometimes also in the foreign policy space, and dealing with combating or countering hate in all its forms including hate that’s based on faith or ethnicity, and, unfortunately, we’ve seen, you know, those problems grow over the years. And so that’s also a very important part of the work that the position that I held in both administrations focused on. 

MANDAVILLE: Great. Great. Thanks so much, Melissa, and I really appreciate the point you made about the continuity between the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administrations and seeing the value of keeping that Faith Office at the White House and preserving the value of those partners. 

I actually experienced a moment of that myself in the Biden-Harris administration. Some of you may be aware that the Biden-Harris administration released USAID’s first ever strategic religious engagement policy. We were very proud of it because it wasn’t just the first time USAID had released a policy on why we work with faith actors.  

It was actually the first time that any U.S. federal agency had developed and released an official policy. What’s less known is that the process to write that policy had actually begun under the Trump administration under when that office was led by one of my predecessors, Kirsten Evans, and the actual text of the policy as released by the Biden administration I would say that 80 percent of it was drafted under the leadership of the Trump administration, which I really think speaks to that sort of bipartisan consensus around the value of these faith partnerships. 

Knox, can I turn to you now and kind of invite your reflections on what you’ve seen and learned in this space over the years?  

THAMES: And, again, I would just add my thanks to the Council, Irina, and you, Peter, for this and these are colleagues I’ve worked with in different capacities throughout my twenty years of government service.  

I’ve now for the last five years been out of government but my story begins in a small town in Kentucky, not a very international part of the world but always had an interest in it, and I give a lot of credit to my parents who were educators at the local university just to bring people into our home from different countries and different cultures to kind of help us understand the broader world. 

And then a real formational part of my interest in this work of human rights and religious freedom was when I, after attending a small Baptist school in Kentucky, went down to Atlanta to do refugee resettlement as an AmeriCorps volunteer with World Relief, and for the first time I had friends who had suffered unimaginable things because they were from the wrong religion, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong political party.  

And it really started sparking some reflections about, you know, the ultimate questions about why do bad things happen to good people but also what is my responsibility as, you know, a Christian who tries to take my faith seriously but also an American, someone who lives in this country that’s been blessed with such influence and resources to try to meet the challenge of a suffering world, and that led me to law school up in D.C. and then a whole sort—a whole pathway of engagements in different government agencies: the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, State Department religious freedom office, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as the policy director and then, as Peter said, serving in a special envoy role during the Obama and Trump administrations focusing on religious minorities in the Middle East and South Asia.  

And I have to say, as I’ve been thinking about this work I was always incredibly proud of our government’s role in advocating for our values internationally. And we talk a lot about, you know, transatlantic values and these shared traditions with our Canadian neighbors and our European partners but, you know, time and time again if the United States didn’t show up to talk about human rights and religious freedom it just really didn’t happen and, you know, we were the and are the indispensable actor on these values issues as well as a host of other issues. And I always just took incredible pride to be sitting behind the placard that said United States and be a small part of representing our proud traditions and I think the challenge—and I think we’ll get into this—is how do we continue this. 

There’s—I think we’re at a moment where just sort of globally speaking the international human rights system that was created after World War II that the United States led in is under incredible pressure. Countries, because of the rise of challengers like China and Russia and others, who talk about human rights are really having to decide how much do we value our values and are we willing to not just talk the talk but walk the walk.  

And if we say human rights matters, if we say religious freedom matters, then will our foreign policy truly reflect that, and that’s part of the role of working in these human rights departments in different parts of the federal government is to be the little angel on the shoulder asking these questions.  

But I think we’re at a moment of inflection to think about as a country, and I think this is great where the religious leaders are in the room because you can play such an important role in sparking this conversation with your congregations. What is the role of the United States? What is our responsibility? What is our opportunity in this very complicated, fractured world to be a voice for the voiceless? 

And I can make the case both for values and interests but I’ll turn it back over to you. Get into that later.  

MANDAVILLE: Yeah. No, thanks so much, Knox.  

I think you’re really framing precisely the questions that are on all of our minds right now that we’re going to want to get into in some detail as we move into the full room discussion in a little while. 

Samah, let me come back to you. You and I both served at and, I think, greatly value the work that USAID has done around the world. This is, obviously, as we all know, a moment of enormous uncertainty and precarity when it comes to the future of U.S. foreign assistance.  

So I just wanted to invite you to reflect on what you’ve been seeing over the last couple of weeks and your thoughts on how to think about the role of U.S. foreign assistance in the context of some of—for example, some of the questions and points that Knox has been raising about the U.S. role in the world.  

NORQUIST: Thanks, Peter.  

I think from my experience one of the things that I was stunned by is the demonizing of the word religion in foreign policy. I mean, it’s not a new thing but it’s—when you—all sort of things come out. It comes the establishment clause. No, we can’t talk this in this region. No, you can’t talk religion.  

And in my mind as you said, both Melissa and Knox, the continuation of the work, to me protection of religious freedom is an American issue. It’s neither a Republican issue nor a Democrat issue. It’s an American issue.  

It’s our first right, and maybe I’m saying that because it’s the immigrant in me that loves this country and loves the laws and loves what the—how this incredible experience that the Founding Father(s) put together.  

But the difference for me is that at this point I don’t consider religious freedom just a human right. I think we’re very much past that. To me, it’s a national security imperative.  

So while we have the—you know, Kirsten Evans is a very good friend of mine. I used to drive her crazy, but she’s one of the really thoughtful, incredible compassionate people.  

The engagement with a faith-based organization is crucial but it does not replace policy formulation. So I think looking at the world stage from both different parts of the world, whether you’re talking about the Uyghurs or the Rohingya or the Christians or the Catholic Church in Nicaragua and Cuba or the Christian Yazidis in everywhere, it’s not just persecution.  

There’s persecution. There is alienation. There is discrimination. So every part of the world there is a challenge that communities of faith face.  

So is it just human rights? To me, yes, it is but we passed that, looking at all sort of state and nonstate actors that commit atrocities in genocide and persecution and discrimination against people of faith.  

So I think, to me, when the first Trump administration came in it was very strong that they elevated religious freedom to a priority in his foreign policy and that was an incredible thing to see a president embark on that, right?  

But it’s not just that. The impact of that was humongous around the world. It was the ministerials that we did. It was the U.S. Commission—U.S. Commission role. And everybody started working with—USAID would work with the—(inaudible)—mission.  

We would go to State Department and they yell at me and I yell at them, but it was—there was more movement towards talking about this issue from a national security perspective because it is time for it to become on the long term part of those discussions.  

USAID had a very unique position in the Trump administration that for the first time USAID was leading the work. It was not the little brother or sister under the State Department. It was the White House implementer.  

It started with northern Iraq. We started developing different things. I, of course, had to learn all the bureaucratic secret codes, whether it’s—you need a key issue to park budgets because you need to develop it. If you don’t have particular things where you need to park the money you can’t do that.  

Oh, by the way, if it’s a policy no ambassador on the ground would listen to it because it did not come in a cable. So even though the president of the United States was talking about it in every way including at the U.N. no ambassador in the field was interested to implement that. 

So every time I had to travel somewhere it was, like, an emergency. I would get a call from the DCM and the political office as if I am coming to convert people, which is not what I was doing. I was trying to use my charm to implement my president’s policies.  

But it was very frustrating. Every ambassador is the chief of mission or her chief of mission. USAID mission directors are under the authority of an ambassador. So if I or even the administrator calls their mission director and say, I want you to do programs with local communities on this issue, if the ambassador said no it’s a no.  

So it took a lot of learning curve for us to understand how you bring that issue and put it into the bloodstream of not just U.S. policy but also budget, engagement with faith-based, diversifying your partnership because USAID has a history of partnering with faith-based organization, and we do a lot of work—great work all around the world. But how we shaped that and talked about it that led to the executive order that President Trump signed.  

Look, what’s happening now is heartbreaking. I don’t believe that the president looking at all the records I have on what we have achieved during his first term. 

Then last week the vice president gives a huge speech about the accomplishments of the Trump administration in the religious freedom—this was in Washington at the IRF Summit. And he was talking about all the great achievement and we’re going to do it again. Everything he talks about was USAID programming, right? 

So it gives me—are they not well advised? Like, and when you look at the players from the inside, yes. I don’t think there is an understanding of President Trump’s legacy programs and the importance of those to continue because not only that we can do it but we already have the structure because we did it in the first term and we could have been ready to hit the ground running.  

So it to me it’s a continuation. It’s an engagement. It’s the faith-based. Faith is a big deal for the American people and we shouldn’t shy to talk about it when we talk overseas because it’s part of the problem and, certainly, part of the solution, and there’s not a single community of faith that was not subject to persecution, discrimination, or alienation, and everybody went through it.  

So I don’t believe that without the United States’ leadership on this issue the way that President Trump did in his first term I think we don’t have a good chance to continue what we started in his first term. So I really, really hope that he does not forget his legacy programs that USAID was able to do.  

MANDAVILLE: Yeah. Thank you so much for that, Samah. 

I really appreciate you kind of pointing to some of those disconnects that we’re all sensing right now and helping us to, you know, understand what’s going on there. And I also appreciate the point you raised about the challenge that I’m sure all of us on the stage have felt, the challenges that come up when you try to raise or work on issues of religion within the U.S. government, right.  

We’ve been trying to do this for decades now but we still all know that there’s so much work to be done. 

NORQUIST: I love those lawyers. Lawyers are great. 

MANDAVILLE: (Laughs.) Yeah. No, and I hope we will get into some of the establishment clause-related challenges that we continue to face.  

Melissa, turning to you. Many of us will be aware that just in the last few days President Trump did issue a new executive order reestablishing a White House faith office and, yet, again, kind of coming back to this idea of the disconnects, we’ve also appeared to—we’ve also seen the administration appear to criticize the different faith groups in the United States in different ways, a lot of confusions and questions about issues related to religious freedom, going forward.  

And so I’d love to invite you to kind of enlighten us in terms of what you’re thinking about and tracking with respect to that religious freedom space right now. 

ROGERS: Yeah. So, yeah, I would agree that there’s a bit of a disconnect at least and I’ll sketch that out in several ways.  

First of all, as you said, you know, the office—an office has been established at the White House and that’s one thing. It has various aims including working on partnerships. But at the same time we see a disruption of this longstanding bipartisan practice of working with faith and community groups to provide federally funded social services, and this is happening through the freezing or pausing of funding.  

It’s happening through the dismantling of USAID and potentially other agencies and also the attacking of certain faith communities at the highest levels of government. And so, you know, it’s just stark the disconnect here and so that is, I think, incredibly dismaying for the reasons I described, for several reasons.  

One is what I described earlier. These partnerships care for vulnerable people, and vulnerable people will be hurt because of this disruption in these partnerships, bottom line. And also this tradition that has been so much a part of our common ground is being eroded swiftly and that’s of great concern, turning an area—the last thing we need in this country is to turn an area that has been an area of consensus into an area of conflict and that’s I fear what’s happening here in addition to the concerns about people in need. 

Also, on the religious freedom side and the religion side there are worries as well. There are—there’s a concern about the ending, for example, of a policy that had been in place by the Department of Homeland Security for more than thirty years that, you know, radically curtailed DHS from taking immigration enforcement actions within houses of worship, schools, and other facilities like that due to a recognition that houses of worship are places that need to be protected as sanctuaries and that people need to be able to gather to worship without fear. Without fear.  

And to have the Trump administration—the Trump administration summarily rescinded this policy that had been embraced by both Democratic and Republican administrations and did so abruptly, as far as I can tell, with no good reason and without talking to any of the community about the values that this policy represented.  

And so the Trump administration has been sued for the rescission of that policy, first by Quakers and this week by a whole bunch of other religious entities. Some of you in the room may have participated in that. So that’s really important.  

And then I’ll just say another thing that I think is just symbolic of a very deep concern that I have and that was for the president of the United States to accuse his political opponents of being anti-religion and anti-God, which he did at the National Prayer Breakfast.  

At that time he said that they oppose religion and oppose God. No U.S. president has any business making such statements. I can’t recall any others who come close to making that kind of statement. That is not only false, it is wildly inappropriate. It’s chilling. It creates the impression that a president may come after you using his power because he has, you know, slurred—made this slur against you.  

And let me just offer one practical example about another fear that I have as a result of that. When the Biden-Harris administration came into office we were, obviously, in the middle of COVID and we had to do, you know, focus like a laser beam on trying to overcome this pandemic both in the United States and around the world.  

And so, you know, President Biden and Vice President Harris were very clear to me and to everybody else you need to go out there and work with every single person, you know, including in the United States, including those who didn’t vote for us, those who deeply disagree with us on policy and on legal issues, and we have got to work together to overcome this pandemic.  

And so, you know, the president went out and the first lady and many others of us to pop up clinics at houses of worship and invited in everybody who disagreed with us six ways to Tuesday on everything else and said, let’s work together. We can all come together around overcoming COVID.  

And a president has to be able to do that. Needs to be able to do that. Not just when it’s a pandemic but that’s one time when it’s especially important. So to, you know, begin to drive wedges between people to cast out, you know, and falsely accuse one’s political opponents of being anti-God and anti-religious just makes that kind of cooperation exceedingly difficult.  

So there are some real serious problems that I’m deeply concerned about of that nature.  

MANDAVILLE: Yeah. No, thank you so much, Melissa. 

Obviously, much, much that we’re going to want to get into shortly and we will after I ask Knox one more question. We are going to pivot to a question and answer and full room discussion. So please do get ready with your questions.  

Knox, Samah alluded to an issue that you and I have together spent a lot of time thinking about and working on—that is, how to best understand the relationship between the promotion of U.S. religious freedom—promotion of religious freedom around the world and the U.S. partnering and working with religious actors in our diplomatic and development work.  

It sometimes has felt over the years that these are talked about as sort of opposing functions or is, like, there’s a hierarchy between them or even sometimes as if there are sort of partisan flavors to them, and I wanted to invite you to kind of share your thoughts on the appropriate way to think about the relationship between those. 

THAMES: Ideally, they go hand in hand. We want to have environments where people are free to pursue truth as their conscience leads, environments that support freedom of religion or belief, because those are environments who are going to be more stable, more productive, less likely to export ills that could come and touch us in harmful ways. 

And we also need to partner with religious actors on issues like sanitation, education, the day-to-day activities that all of us go through our lives needing that kind of assistance because religious actors have that community reach, and this is where the two complement each other because an environment that has religious freedom is an environment where faith actors can be their best selves and be that conscience of the community to speak truth to power, to help with the poor and the suffering.  

And when there isn’t religious freedom then religious actors, religious leaders, will be hesitant to engage on issues of conflict resolution because they’ll be afraid the government is monitoring them or their neighbors may attack them.  

So there’s a lot of just practical evidence I think many of us have experienced over the years where the two make a lot of sense together and they build off each other, and I think this is where sort of the question of how does the U.S. government fit into this. 

And there’s the political diplomatic work that I’ve been involved in. There’s the humanitarian assistance work that Samah has been involved in and, again, they complement each other. The diplomatic push to use the influence and might of the United States to encourage governments to change oppressive laws, let people out of jail, register faith communities, so there isn’t that persecution, while partnering with those religious actors in community to meet these huge challenges of the developing world.  

And this is the tragedy of what we’ve seen the last couple of weeks with the dismantling of USAID and a lot of the—there’s been a lot of focus on humanitarian aid and the waiver question and—but I think what’s gone unnoticed outside of probably this room is the impact that the freeze of grants has had on human rights organizations that are doing religious freedom work, a lot of which were relying on the money USAID program under Samah’s tenureship during the Trump administration that’s all been frozen. So programs in Cuba, in Pakistan, these frontline countries where persecution is real, is now frozen.  

And so, you know, I’m hoping this administration will start to connect the dots. We’ve seen them talk about and highlight, like Samah mentioned, the good work the previous—the first administration did that produced religious freedom gains because of the funding.  

We’ve seen, you know, even in the Project 2025 document on USAID, you know, is that official or not. But it’s instructive in that religious freedom was mentioned a dozen times. There were, certainly, those—in the incoming administration you saw the value of this work and then the political dynamics of the last two weeks have totally disrupted it.  

But there’s still an opportunity to revive these programs, to lift the freeze, to get the money flowing. I’m told there’s a listening session happening this week in Washington with different constituents about unlocking the funds.  

I think that’s crucial that the Trump administration realize the investment they made in the first term, realize the impact they were having for good and recognize that this pause, freeze, is having a detrimental impact on the groups that they have talked about publicly wanting to assist.  

MANDAVILLE: Great. Thank you all. You’ve given us so much to work with.  

So let’s get into it. We’ve got about thirty minutes to us available for a discussion, questions and answers, so I’m going to invite our audience to ask their questions. When you’re recognized to speak could I ask that you stand up and that you wait for one of the CFR staff to bring you a microphone before you start speaking? 

And please do go ahead and introduce yourself, giving us just your name and affiliation. I know many of you in the room but two things working against me in this regard. There’s lights in my eyes—(laughter)—and I left my glasses in my hotel room. So if I don’t recognize by name those of you I know very well please do forgive me.  

So who would like to get us started this evening? Unsurprisingly, a sea of hands go up, which—no, no, no, keep them up.  

Q: Thank you very much. My name is Azza Karam and I currently serve as a senior consultant in an organization that’s newly created called Lead Integrity. 

Happy, very happy, and very grateful to every single person on the panel, and I want to take this opportunity to doff my cap to Samah because I know that she’s had a tremendously important role to play.  

So thank you for everything you’ve said and thank you for mentioning the hijacking of Islamic faith by certain categories of people. I think it’s something that causes a tremendous wound to every single Muslim regardless of their political affiliation. So thank you for that.  

Two quick questions. To what extent is it—and actually it’s to all of your distinguished speakers here—but to what extent is it possible to argue that religion does need to be part of domestic and foreign policy and then get upset when the discord politically within an administration causes, obviously, a discord within the perspective and the application of that—of aspects related to religion? 

It can’t be that you adopt it and it becomes a mainstream part of your policy and then think it’s all going to be for the good. 

Second comment/question. None of you have mentioned the fact that thanks to what was—has been has happening with Gaza the U.S. government in general and the U.S. image in general has pretty much gone down in the dumps.  

So I’m not quite sure how you reconcile that with America has a role to play in advocating for freedom of this or the human rights of that. You might want to just touch upon what does it do now. 

Thank you.  

MANDAVILLE: Thank you so much, Azza. 

I’d like to invite any of our panelists who would like to respond to any of the points that Azza has raised. 

ROGERS: Well, I can go ahead and address. I think some of the points you raised—the second part of your question.  

So, you know, we all know and you all know that the discussion about religion and government is always a tricky one, a nuanced one, an important one.  

I don’t think we can have because of—simply because of our religious liberty guarantees we need to discuss the relationship of religion and government because we have to ensure, for example, that government policies are consistent with the First Amendment’s guarantees of no establishment and free exercise.  

And we have to make sure that all people in the United States and, I would say, around the world, too, no matter their faith and beliefs can engage government and that they’re not held off because of their faith or beliefs, whatever they are.  

So I think we can’t say that, you know, religion and government shouldn’t be in conversation but how we do that is very important, and I think we’re going to always have debates, for example, about certain religious freedom issues. You know, people are going to see things different ways and that’s to be expected.  

What I think we need to avoid is slandering, you know, one or another side of the political—you know, the political landscape as being, you know, anti-God and things of that nature that just poisons the—it’s not true. It’s not appropriate. It’s stepping over a line that the—certainly, the president and highest leaders of our country and all leaders, I would say, need to respect.  

And so, you know, it is not that this is a simple thing but I don’t think we can just simply say, well, we just, because there’s some topics that are difficult and we feel strongly about them and sometimes argue with each other vociferously, that that means that, you know, we should not have, you know, this conversation about religion and government.  

I think we have to. We just have to make sure that we’re all doing our best to conduct the conversation as respectfully as we can and not denigrating people for their faith or beliefs. 

MANDAVILLE: Samah or Knox? 

NORQUIST: I’ll say two things.  

Your first question, so it’s not either/or, right, and it’s every—both parties have their challenges in it and the advantages and promoters of religious freedom. One of the things that I am fascinated by, and I talk to the—my friends at the U.S. Commission about, I remember the reaction after 9/11 and the—from, you know, different parts, particularly on the right.  

You fast forward to the times of at least where I can mention the Trump administration that the caliber that came, particularly from the right, to defend the Uyghurs, to speak about religious freedom not just for one or two particular faiths but for everyone was astonishing to me. 

For people that looked and had perception from after 9/11 to when we got to the Trump administration and there was this whole coalition of groups, policymakers, U.S. commissioners, ambassadors, faith-based organizations. It was incredible. It was truly the point where everybody cared about this issue and it didn’t matter what faith you came from. 

That’s just my perspective, and it’s very helpful because I can go and talk to someone who is—who had a different perception about my faith after 9/11, and now we’re allies and we’re partners and we fight for the same issues. 

In term(s) of the Gaza, so I have to say something about this, and I’ll share a really quick story with you. So I’m very pragmatic. I will speak up and I won’t shy about issues that I believe in and that I can do something about, right?  

So at the beginning of the Trump administration everybody—a lot of people became angry. Why is this becoming a priority and we’re cutting all the other programs? And there was a particular experience where I had someone from the bureau that I was at that looked at me and was very emotional and said, I don’t understand how could you sit here and advocate for this administration while they’re cutting aid to the Palestinians.  

And I looked at her and I said, one, because I can do something about this and I can’t do something about that, and, two, because I come from a region if all—the mosaic of that region if we don’t protect the three Abrahamic faiths and what’s happening there will be no Middle East. That does not serve the interest of the United States.  

So the perception about someone like me that, oh my God, you care about Republican issues or conservative issues more than you care, that’s just not fair. No one knows what’s going on inside me. I have two teenagers that have watched me doing the work that I do, and my younger daughter, who’s fifteen now, was in fourth and fifth grade. When she went to fifth grade she watches me like a hawk.  

Her teacher asked them to do a presentation about some effective personality and she went and bought—I don’t know how many of you know who Mama Maggie is. Mama Maggie is the Mother Theresa of Egypt. She is an incredible woman. She has created this whole network of providing services to—they call them it’s in the garbage collector area of old Cairo and you literally go to that area.  

So I took the administrator, Mark Green, of USAID and we went to visit her, and they had this whole festival for us, right? So my daughter saw the stories and I was explaining to her, the little kids, what she did and how she washed the little kids’ feet. 

And so my daughter was affected by all that. In her mind now it doesn’t matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Muslim or Christian. Because my daughters go to both. They go to a church and they go to a mosque. They celebrate Christmas and we passed Ramadan. That’s the kind of kids and mother that I am but that’s also the kind of American that I am, if that makes sense. 

MANDAVILLE: Thank you, Samah. 

And, Knox, you wanted to add something briefly? 

THAMES: Just a quick—I mean, you’re asking about are we being hypocritical and I think from—that was always a challenge when you were doing human rights diplomacy on behalf of a superpower. How do you close the gap between the stated values and the actions?  

And, you know, again, I said—I talked about the pride I had of representing American values on the global stage, and we do more than really any—all the other countries combined. I don’t think that would be hyperbole to say that.  

But at the same time there are these gaps and I think as a community of values in this room how do we challenge our elected leaders to close those gaps so that when we say human rights matter, we say religious freedom matters, we actually see that executed in a way that’s tangible in our foreign policy. 

And it’s wickedly difficult when you’re inside the bureaucracy. But like Samah said and we’ve all experienced, you do the job because if you can get the small wins and just change the ship of state by 5 percent, you know, in thirty years you can really have an impact in an unimaginable way because of the incredible influence that our country has.  

So, I mean, I think we should continue to be challenged by those comments and then think about how do we close the gap between our values and what we’re doing. 

MANDAVILLE: Great. Thanks to all of you. 

Let’s go here. And also let me—I want to make sure to bring in some voices from the back of the room. So could I see hands from the back of the room of anyone who’d like to ask a question?  

OK, good. Then we’ll go to that gentleman afterward. I think—is that Reverend Adam Taylor? Yes, my eyes do still work. Wonderful. Please. 

Q: Good evening. Hyepin Im with Faith and Community Empowerment. Hi, Melissa. 

So, first of all, thank you so much for sharing about the Trump administration’s accomplishments. This is the first time hearing it and so it does give me pause that many times we are in silos and we get fed a certain portion. So it was encouraging to hear of that—of those accomplishments. 

I’m curious. My first question is now that President Trump has approved or given executive order for the faith-based offices I am just wondering what do you foresee of those offices doing in this new second administration and what was your experience like? It seems like you’ve had positive outcomes in working with President Trump. 

Q: So that’s my first question. And then the second piece of the question is that he is standing on this platform of faith or evangelical Christians, et cetera, et cetera. But attacking houses of worship seems counter to that. 

Right now maybe they might be attacking certain houses of worship, potentially, but in essence at the end of the day it opens the door for all houses of worship to be vulnerable and I’m just wondering—in the first Trump administration I saw a lot of insiders turn against him and so I’m just curious if there might be some pathway where that might happen or how can we all work together, bring some of those other individuals to advocate together in terms of some of these policies that are really hurting the country.  

As a(n) immigrant I remember very clearly until very recently always thinking, boy, I’m so glad I’m in the United States because in my home country, you know, they’re doing these terrible things. But now the very things that I thought I was safe from is literally happening in the United States, so I mourn that loss and I pray that there is still hope. And as I believer that—I remind myself that God is in control. But still, I’d like to hear your thoughts. (Laughs.) 

MANDAVILLE: Great. Thank you. Over to the panel.  

NORQUIST: Let me tackle your first question. So the president in his second term signed a number of executive orders to realign a lot of—particularly when it came to USAID. That is absolutely needed, in my opinion. There is a lot of waste. The government of the United States is not, you know, pure. There’s a lot of things that we can get rid of. There’s some people that do—and, I believe, in both administrations—obstruct policies, right, for no reason. And I want to go back to the lawyers, because that’s—so there has been a lot of—everybody, oh, USAID is evil, OK?  

So one of the things that people—because USAID sucked at telling the story domestically, because they always looked at we do good overseas, right? When everything is happening, I don’t think even the president understood the correlation between USAID and the domestic American faith-based organizations, farmers, our food programs, all the commodities, our grown—our American-grown commodities. There are tons of wheat are now sitting in Houston rotten because of that freeze. And I sincerely don’t believe that he knows all these little things, right? Because when you look—not just on religious freedom. When you look at—even Ivanka Trump during the first administration—Trump administration, she partnered with USAID on what we call the WGDP. It was a $50 million initiative on helping women in Africa, particularly over—all around. 

So there are a lot of good things that we have done, it was a Trump legacy programs that either have been canceled or put on pause. And I don’t know if you saw that. Even Reverend Graham came out a couple of days ago because Samaritan’s Purse is one of our biggest partners, not just in Christian places but they were partners with us to help the Yazidis in northern Iraq. So I think there is a real lack of understanding. Everybody thinks that USAID is just, you know, this big—they just spend money on—yes, they are. But they had this scalpel, and instead of removing the tumor they killed the patient, without knowing—I mean, you look at their website. It’s completely dark. Why is that, right? Everyone is claiming there’s this program—and I don’t doubt that there are bad programs that they need to go. But there are also a lot of good programs.  

And one thing I need to say, when USAID—there’s not a single penny that goes out of USAID without, first, State Department approving it, OMB approving it. Then after those two it goes to Congress, because we do something—they call it CNs, some— 

MANDAVILLE: Congressional notifications.  

NORQUIST: Thank you. So every time I needed to get a program out of the door, I had to go through all these three. Then I get to Congress. And then I get a call from our legislative affairs. Hey, so-and-so—Senator so-and-so, member of Congress so-and-so wants you to come to explain to them and justify what—so it’s not like USAID has a blank check. There are regulations. There are monitoring. I’m sure there’s some ways. I’m sure there are things that need to go and we shouldn’t have. But it doesn’t mean that you kill the entire thing, because USAID can be an incredibly important tool for America’s national interest overseas. 

MANDAVILLE: Thanks so much, Samah. You’re pointing, I think, to another one of these really important disconnects that we have to talk about. You know, not just the oversight that the State Department has and the White House, over the programs that USAID are running, but USAID among federal agencies has an unusually high percentage of its budget that’s directly earmarked by Congress. Meaning that the programs USAID are running it’s not necessarily the programs that USAID development professionals want to run. They’re running the programs that members of Congress have directed to them to run in specific sectors and specific countries.  

Would either Melissa or Knox like to respond? Then I guess we will go to Reverend Taylor, please. 

Q: Yeah. Thank you. Reverend Adam Taylor. I lead an organization called Sojourners. Grateful to see so many friends and hopefully make new friends. Thanks for what’s been shared so far.  

So I’m grateful that many of you have named the freeze and dismantling of USAID, but I feel like one of the elephants in the room is Elon Musk, that we have not mentioned by name. And it was Elon Musk, who is largely unaccountable, unelected, who obviously leads the Department of Government Efficiency, that is doing a lot of this wrecking ball work—not just with USAID, but now with other agencies. And it was him who literally said that USAID is evil, that they’re a criminal organization. And we’re among religious leaders so I want to inject some scripture into this room. I’m going to quote Isaiah 5:20, that says, “Woe to you who call evil good and good evil.” 

And so part of what makes me so distraught in this moment is the degree to which it feels like bipartisan support for poverty-focused foreign assistance evaporated in Congress. And many of us in this room spent a lot of time building that support for PEPFAR, but then for poverty-focused development assistance more broadly. And it feels like there’s been a deafening silence, particularly on the Republican side. There are some exceptions to this, but I think part of what we desperately need is intervention, is for Congress to stand up—both because what is happening, I would argue, is illegal—and the courts will ultimately decide that—it’s deeply immoral, and it’s deeply damaging to the U.S. reputation in the world, let alone costing lives.  

So I would just love your thoughts about kind of where Congress is in this whole equation. What would it take to try to rebuild that bipartisan support? Because the name of this panel, I think, is a little misleading in the moment we’re in now. There’s not much to sustain. (Laughs.) We actually have to rebuild. So I’m curious how we rebuild. 

MANDAVILLE: Great. Thanks so much, Reverend Taylor. The panel title was planned prior to the inauguration (laughter) and the events afterwards—(laughs)—but you’re pointing to something that is absolutely accurate. Let me—let me turn to my fellow panelists to invite their responses and thoughts on the questions you’re raising. 

NORQUIST: I’ll take just a—I think I’ll reiterate a point that I—is the lack of information by the American people. My former colleagues always talk about feeding the babies in Haiti, you know, providing health programs in—somewhere in Africa. And I go, that’s incredible. And it’s important and helping the vulnerable. And that’s the good face, and beautiful face, of the United States and American people’s generosity towards the world. But people in mid-Arkansas and Oklahoma don’t really care, because why are you taking my money over there while there are so many things are here? So the way we talk about it, there is—nobody put the connection between American farmers—and, by the way, there are a lot of American universities, science researchers, health programs, all that kind of stuff that we do.  

And not just that. There are a lot of the private-public partnerships on so many programs that you help create different opportunities over there because some people can’t come over here, and go to our universities, and stay, or work. So you want them to build their own society because that serves us eventually. None of that talks. Everybody is just talking about Elon Musk. It’s not about Elon Musk. I’m sorry. It’s about what is good for the United States. And it is not even about the president. It is about the mission of a tool that we have that serves not just the American people, but does good around the world—which is what incredible faith-based organizations do.  

There’s a lot of talks about big contractors and, you know, slashing everything, all that. That’s what I mentioned the darkening of the USAID website, because nobody can go and look at the programs that—if you have problems with what the Biden administration did, and many do, then go back and see what the mission throughout other administrations. You’re eliminating an entire agency that can do a lot of work, and good work. You can shrink it. You can modify it to realign with your policies, but not take it down. But the American people only know USAID that you take our money, and you give it to foreigners. So that’s what—that’s where I stand.  

MANDAVILLE: Thanks. 

ROGERS: And along those lines, I would recommend—I’m not sure if you saw it—a really excellent op-ed by Senator Chris Coons, who talked about, you know, how USAID certainly helps people all around the world, and helps—and USAID’s work helps protect American interests. So I highly recommend that column. And speaking of him, that’ll help me segue to the next part of your question, Adam, or your point, which I agree that we’ve got to do intensive work on finding common ground again among people of different political persuasions and ideological persuasions. And Senator Chris Coons has been so good about doing that. That, you know, hope springs eternal that some of the—some of the things that have happened over the last few weeks will shake things up to a degree that we begin to have some new conversations across different lines of politics and ideology.  

And I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen some people very courageously speak out in the last few weeks about their concerns of some of these actions who are, you know, conservative leaning, Republican, whatever you want to call it. And so, again, hope springs eternal that by listening to one another, by forming new coalitions, by trying wherever we possibly can to speak in a shared voice across differences in our politics and our ideology, that some people may be able to hear us for the very first time. And so, you know, that’s certainly my prayer and hope, that we’ll—and I know you do this work yourself so well, Adam. And really appreciate it. We’ve got to just double down on that and try to learn to listen and work together in ways perhaps that we haven’t even before.  

THAMES: Just a quick addition. Peter and I, through our affiliation with U.S. Institute of Peace, a few years ago put together a working group of folks, right, left, and center, all faiths and none, to think about, how do we protect international religious freedom as a bipartisan foreign policy initiative. And the first recommendation was really obvious, but we thought it needed to be said, is don’t politicize the work of protecting international religious freedom, because it’s often about life and death. It’s some of the most heinous situations in the world.  

So I think in this debate about funding we also need to have a mind towards the end goal and the end communities we’re trying to assist that, they don’t become part of the political football. And that’s super hard to do in this social media environment we live in. But while we’re working to make the case for why USAID is needed and why the funding needs to be turned back on, that the groups we’re trying to assist are—we try to put a hedge of protection around them, to use some church language, so that they don’t get sucked into these mind-numbing debates in D.C., and that the United States can still provide assistance, hopefully, once we sort this out.  

MANDAVILLE: Thanks, Knox. Folks, I’m afraid we have reached our allotted time. I regret there are so many questions that we didn’t have a chance to get to. The good news is that we have the rest of the evening together, and, of course, we have all of tomorrow together. I want to invite you to join me in thanking our panelists for laying the groundwork for those discussions. (Applause.) 

Two things before we transition to dinner. One logistical reminder. I want to remind all of you that breakfast will begin here at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow. And please be sure to bring your name tags and lanyards with you for that. Finally, before we turn to enjoy the dinner, I would like to invite to the podium Reverend Mark Fowler, who will offer a blessing before we eat. Reverend Fowler. 

FOWLER: Let us first take a deep breath together. This is the Religion and Foreign Policy Workshop. So let us ground ourselves in the one part, so that we might participate in the other.  

We honor the first peoples and the first nations. With no name for God, they honored and revered “creator” and “creation” and were inextricably connected to it. We acknowledged the unceded lands upon which we gather, and with humility ask that we be responsible and accountable for any ongoing actions which contribute to the inequity of the first peoples and nations. We learned to look to the east and the south and the west and the north. We look above and below and within and connect with the sacred. We acknowledge the traditions which sprang forth from the realization that there was something greater expressing itself across this planet and through the universe.  

We are grateful for this time together. We acknowledge that policy is foreign only if we are foreign to one another. We strive in this time together to find our way back to each other and to bring our people with us. We pray that our hearts be broken open so loving kindness flows like a river and that our voices are freed to speak love and truth and power for all the peoples of the world. We acknowledge all the ancestors represented in this room at this time. We thank them for the lives they lived, which give us our lives, and pray that we live lives worth acknowledging after we’re gone. 

We bless the food we are about to receive, that it may nourish our bodies and our spirits. And we commit ourselves that no one shall go hungry, and that the bounty provided to us be shared according to need. We bless the people who set this room, will serve the food, will clean this room, and reset this room, and serve food tomorrow, and clean this room tomorrow. And may they and their people be blessed as well. This is my prayer. 

And if it’s appropriate, please say with me: amen, amin, asé, and so it is. 

(END) 

FASKIANOS: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to day two of the 2025 CFR Religion and Foreign Policy Workshop. Just a reminder that all of these plenary sessions are on the record, and members of the religion community are joining via live stream. So do silence your mobile devices so we don’t have interruption. And there is a prayer room for your use on the second floor, and we can guide you to that.  

So I’m excited to have our first panel of the morning on “Faith, Peacebuilding, and Reconciliation,” to join us. So please make your way, and Azza Karam will be moderating this discussion. 

KARAM: Thank you. Good morning, all. In my tradition, we would wish you all peace as-salaam alaikum, shalom, peace in every way and form on each and all of you. It’s lovely to be with you here this morning. 

We open with a very interesting intersectional aspect of religion, which has to do with peacemaking and reconciliation—not minor issues, given the world we’re living in and what we’re facing right now. So it’s a great pleasure and a distinct honor to be with you here today, and especially to be with this amazing panel. We have with us an opportunity to learn and listen.  

We will go first to Dr. Paul Stares, who is the person who knows everything about the annual Preventative Priorities Survey on religious conflict. He will lay the land out for us and tell us what the data, the facts, statistics, tell us.  

We’ll go from there to Josefina Echavarría Álvarez. I have probably butchered her name. I’m very sorry. 

ALVAREZ: That’s perfect. 

KARAM: And Josefina will be able to walk us through some very concrete instances and examples of both peacemaking and reconciliation. Josefina serves as a director of the Peace Accords Matrix and professor of practice at Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.  

From there, we will visit Sri Lanka via Prashan De Visser, who’s also going to tell us a bit. He’s the founder and president of Global Unites, as well as the founder of Sri Lanka Unites. And this is a very interesting space and context, which he will also elaborate a little bit, because it’s an example from a Sri Lankan context that is applicable to many others around the world. So he’ll speak to us a little bit about some of those dynamics there.  

By the way, I’m Azza. Nice to meet you all. I serve in the first women-led global faith inspired management consultancy. It’s called Lead Integrity. In case anyone is wondering why we have that name, you can talk to me later.  

I have the personal privilege of being the moderator of this session, and I just wanted to abuse the privilege ever so slightly to begin us with a few reflections. It transpires that thirty-five years of working in this area as a Muslim woman may not be good enough for wisdom. So therefore, I’m going to translate and to refer to some of those whose wisdom is much more accepted. And bear with me for a second as I share some of those thoughts before I hand over to the much more competent people on this panel.  

I’d like to begin with a quote from—I’ll tell you in a second where it is from, but let me read it out first. “There was a time when I blamed my companion if his religion did not resemble mine. Now, however, my heart accepts every form. Love alone is my religion.” In case you’re wondering who said this, it’s a chap called ibn al-Arabi, who was an al-Andalusian Muslim scholar, mystic, poet, philosopher, and rather influential in Islamic thought from 1165 to 1240. He was also a Sufi, one of my favorite forms. Mysticism tends to be the best of spirituality, I think. 

So several centuries before the modern era, we have this idea of wahdat al-adyan, which is one of the main features of what ibn al-Arabi brought about: the unity of religions.  

We also all know about Émile Durkheim, whose work on the sacred offers a starting point for a public language for thinking about the moral basis of society.  

The person I really want to leave a quote about with you, since it’s rather relevant to where we are in the world today, is Rene Girard. And I’m going to read a quote. It’s a little bit long. Bear with me for a second. I’m going to be emphasizing certain parts of it, totally my emphasis. So please don’t blame the man, or he’ll turn in his grave. What does he have to say, Girard, about religion and conflict and peacebuilding? 

“Religion instructs men as to what they must and must not do to prevent a recurrence of destructive violence. When they neglect rights and violate prohibitions they call down upon themselves transcendent violence which assumes the role of the demonic tempter, an illusion for which men will continue to fight, spiritually as well as physically, to the point of total annihilation. We, the spoiled children of privilege, consider God’s anger as something illusory. In fact, it is a terrible reality. Its justice is implacable, its impartiality truly divine. Anger shows no distinctions in its dealings with men. It is at one with reciprocity, with the irresistible tendency of violence to turn against the unfortunate beings who have sought to shape it exclusively to their own uses. Because of their large scale and sophisticated organization, modern Western societies have appeared largely immune to violence as law of retribution. In consequence, modern thinkers assume that this law is, and always has been, mere illusion, and those modes of thinking that treat it as real are sheer fantasies. To be sure, these modes of thinking must be considered mythic insofar as they attribute the enforcement of the law to an authority extrinsic to man.  

“But the law of retribution itself is very real. It has its origins in the reality of human relationships. If we are still strangers to this law, it is not because we have managed to transcend it, but because of its application to the modern world has been indefinitely postponed for reasons unknown to us. That, perhaps, is what contemporary history is making clear.”  

Yet, it isn’t, because that law is visiting us and we live the reciprocity of the consequences of violence right now, mythic or otherwise. Our society has changed. We are living some kind of retribution.  

And to speak much more authoritatively, I’d like to hand the floor to Dr. Stares. Paul. 

STARES: OK. Well, thank you, Azza. Thank you all for being here. And thank Irina and her team for allowing me the opportunity to speak to you today. 

What I thought I could do—and I think this was the setup from Azza—to talk a little bit about our annual conflict assessment tool that we carry out here at the Council on Foreign Relations. We’ve been doing it now for seventeen years, since 2008. And it’s not a religious conflict, or conflict infused with religion assessment. It’s a broad global conflict assessment. And essentially, we survey many hundreds of U.S. foreign policy experts every year, usually at the end of November, to gauge their concern about thirty potential conflicts or crises that could occur in the coming twelve months. And the notion is that we ask them to not only tell us how likely they think these conflicts might be, but also how threatening they might be to U.S. national interests.  

And we collect the results, and then we sort them into three tiers of relative priority. That’s why it’s called the Preventive Priority Survey. And here it is, and I think there are some copies outside, and I urge you to grab them. 

And we sort them into three tiers of relative priority on the sort of the basic premise that not every potential crisis or conflict is equally threatening, and we should try to be a little discriminating of where we focus our attention and resources so that we can actually try to make a difference, rather than our spreading ourselves too thinly or doing nothing, worse.  

So in terms of this year’s results, I thought it was pretty striking, you know, given the amount of attention and concern that there’s been in recent years about growing great power conflict and rivalry, increasing or intensifying economic competition that might lead to international conflict of various kinds, the impact of technical change, artificial intelligence, climate change, how that could be a stressor.  

The top four or five contingencies this year are really focused on the Middle East. And while the conflicts aren’t specifically or solely religious in nature, we all, I think, accept that religion plays a major part in those conflicts. Let me just go through some of them.  

The number-one concern of U.S. foreign policy experts was Gaza, followed very closely by the prospect of intensifying violence in the West Bank. 

Ukraine, I think, was next. And while that is really not so much a religious conflict, religious actors have been mobilized to incite various tensions and grievances and so on.  

Fourth is Israel and Iran. So out of the top five, four had some religious aspect to them.  

Of the thirty contingencies, I would say probably over a half also have some sort of religious component to them. Lebanon, the role of the Houthis in attacking Israel, very much driven by their solidarity with Hamas Gaza. 

Syria, the prospect there of potential sectarian conflict, again, a concern. 

India, Pakistan, that was in the second tier. It’s long been there. But the prospect of potential conflict there. 

Lower down, mainly African-type contingencies, the Sahel, Nigeria. 

Myanmar, Mozambique, and also the Balkans all have a religious component to them. So I think it’s quite interesting that despite the general or rising concern about sort of major power rivalry conflict, the clear concern or focus of concern of most U.S. foreign policy experts this year is very much on conflicts where religion is, I think, a real factor. And I think it’s something that we should be mindful of, and perhaps we can talk further about it this morning. 

KARAM: And we will and we will. And I think there’s an interesting—we had an excellent presentation yesterday, series of presentations, and one of the issues was the extent to which religion is part of and needs to be much more mindfully part of foreign policy, foreign affairs, et cetera. If we do insist on that, we also have to realize that it’s not about whether religion is culpable or not, but it is the extent to which religions intersect with different aspects of conflict. 

And perhaps we can hear a little bit on that domain and dimension from you, please, Dr. Josefina. 

ALVAREZ: Thank you, Azza. Thank you very much, and thank you to the Council for this kind invitation and to the staff for all the work that they’re doing, feeding us and keeping us warm in here.  

My name is Josefina Echavarría. I work for the University of Notre Dame, and I direct the Peace Accords Matrix.  

This is a research project in which we follow the implementation of peace accords in our thirty-four countries around the world. We learn a lot by looking at the ways peace accords are being implemented. We learn certain provisions have a higher rate of implementation. We learn how do we really sustain peace after the signatures. So we are all, I think, involved in different moments and phases of peacebuilding.  

There is a myth that peace accords don’t work. It is a myth. More than 75 percent of peace accords actually work if they are comprehensive, so if they move beyond security concerns and involve questions of justice, socioeconomic development, and political participation, around years three to five of implementation.  

So some of the things that we have done at the university is trying to understand not when peace accords fail, but when peace accords implementation succeed. And so that makes my job, in general terms, very optimistic, because I try to understand when is peacemaking making a difference.  

And I want to tell you a very short story of our work in Colombia. We have two field units on the ground, one in Colombia and one in Mindanao in the Philippines.  

Last year, we were with a delegation of the University of Notre Dame in the Darién Gap. I think many of you might have heard about this. Secretary Rubio was in the Panama Canal some days ago.  

But the gap is a geographical, topographic region between Colombia and Panama that is really tough in terms of the nature, in terms of the jungle, the currents in the sea on the Pacific side, and it has become a corridor for an increment of illegal markets—human trafficking, but also cocaine, paramilitary groups, all sorts of mafias.  

And we were there last year with the delegation of Notre Dame. We called a meeting with civil society organizations, faith leaders, government officials. We were trying to understand how was the implementation of the 2016 peace accord going in that particular area of the country. And then a woman that was a representative of Caritas Colombia said to us simply, no other vests are allowed here.  

I think that summarizes for me the question of, how do we work with religious peacemaking and religious peacemakers on the ground as an evidence-based university, also a Catholic university, and is that, of course, what we see on the ground is that religious organizations and faith-based organizations provide us with, of course, the possibility to negotiate with illegal armed actors on the ground. They protect our staff. Without those vests that signal that it is a faith-based organization, we couldn’t do our work of monitoring on the ground. We couldn’t triangulate the information.  

But they have also helped us further in our work on the ground, because we have included specific strategic partnerships with the church in both Colombia and in the Philippines to be able to, for example, as simply as implement administrative tasks in the country as a U.S.-based organization.  

And very important, the implementation of a peace accord is also filled with crisis, and it requires conflict resolution between conflict parties that had been, you know, fighting each other for years. The church has been able to help us build a relationship of trust, and in crisis of the implementation of the accord, we have relied on them to remain both impartial and engaged. So for us, it has been a very important partner, specifically in these two field units around the world. 

KARAM: Brilliant. Thank you very much for that.  

And when you mentioned vests, I was immediately thinking of the press journalists who wear the press and UN officials who wear their vests too, and they nevertheless get blown up. Yes, it is important to be able to distinguish those who are trying to build the peace and make it. 

Prashan, Prashan De Visser, tell us a little bit about the work that you’re doing and the difference that you see religions making to the peacebuilding space. 

DE VISSER: Thank you. Good morning and hi, everyone. Vanakkam. As-salaam alaikum from Sri Lanka. It’s an absolute joy and a privilege to be here. I have enjoyed my time. And I really especially want to thank the Council on Foreign Relations for the warm hospitality and invitation. Despite the cold weather and being out of my mind trying to figure out how to endure it, your warm hospitality has made all the difference. But when I leave tonight, I won’t miss the weather. (Laughter.) 

But so it’s a privilege to be here. At the grassroots movement, we started our work in Sri Lanka just before the end of the civil war. Sri Lanka has seen cycles of violence. In nearly seventy-seven years of independence almost every fifteen to eighteen years we’ve had cycles of violence along ethnic lines, along religious lines, along political ideology.  

And each time we’ve seen young people have been lured into violence, brainwashed into believing that violence is the only way that there may be justice, there may be a better, thriving future. And that lie has been passed down from generation to generation. No justice was accomplished. No thriving future was accomplished. We were worse off for it. 

And we as a generation towards the end of the civil war started asking this question, saying, there has to be a better way. What if a new generation dares to unite, a new generation dares to look at the way things have been done, and we don’t have to make the same mistakes? You know, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from history is we don’t learn from history. So what if a generation is mature enough to say, where have we gone wrong in the past, and how have these same mistakes been made over and over again?  

And at the same time, we looked at our country, and over 70 percent of Sri Lankan youth when we started off eighteen years ago didn’t have a friend outside their ethnicity or their religion. A small island the size of the state of West Virginia with 22 million people, and 70 percent of a new generation don’t have a friend outside their ethnicity or their religion. 

But there are plenty of opinions about the other, and more often than not, they’re negative opinions. And so how are you so confident about your opinion about the other if you have never met somebody? And after a little bit of thinking, they say, my grandfather told me, my father told me, elders in our local communities told me. So it was inherited prejudice that led to more bad decisions and gave them no opportunity to enjoy the beauty of the diversity in our country and the refined experience that they could have.  

So we started asking that question, what if we can bridge that gap? What if we can bring young people together? And that started having a huge impact.  

Even the school system, there are about 10,400 schools in the island, and out of the 10,400 only 112 schools have Sinhala medium and Tamil medium under the same roof. So it’s almost institutionalized segregation. So whenever an extremist group or a violent group wants to recruit, it’s easy to brainwash young people to believe anything, because they have no real life experience to know otherwise. Politicians during election time, it’s a perfect time to radicalize young people and make them believe if you want your rights, you have to vote for your guy. Your guy may be a crook, your guy may be violent, but it’s your guy. And so they’ve continued to divide and rule.  

And so we started saying, if we can help young people have that interaction, have a deep, integrated experience, they will start making better decisions. And the model that we started in Sri Lanka today, we’ve engaged over 1.5 million youth in Sri Lanka in the last fifteen to eighteen years, and over 30,000 members. The movement has expanded throughout schools and universities. 

And then we started getting interest from other countries with similar realities. So to make a long story short, we are Global Unites. We are registered as a non-profit here in the United States. We’re in fourteen countries: Congo Unites, Uganda Unites, Afghanistan Unites, Liberia Unites, Sierra Leone and so on.  

And we’ve trying to train this new generation is, we’ve seen consistently there is very high amounts of segregation and a lack of experience of the other across religious lines, ethnic lines, tribal, you name it. And when you don’t have an understanding of the other, like I said before, it’s easy for you to believe whatever anybody tells you. So to have the ability of asking critical questions and have the courage to reach out—and in fact, one of the ways when we pick our key leaders, we ask them, you know, who are your ten closest friends, who are the ten people who will definitely be invited for your wedding, and then we said, I’ll go through your list. Is there anybody who is from a different religion than you. Is there anybody who tends to vote differently? Anybody from a different socioeconomic background? And more often than not—these are people who want to be involved in peacemaking—there is no intersection.  

We have now launched in the USA as well, first time a movement from the Global South is working with young people in the States for efforts towards reconciliation. And we’re getting so many applicants of college students around the globe. We want to be peacebuilders. We want to learn the art of bringing people together. And over 90 percent of the applicants don’t have a friend across—like deep inner circle friends across religious lines, and immediately you’re paralyzing yourself from being effective to really understand, to empathize.  

This morning, I was reading scripture, the second letter of the Apostle Peter, and there was something in it that I thought I should share. It says, “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.”  

And I started looking at this in the work of interfaith engagement. If we’ve been starting to work on interfaith engagement, it’s important that you see the goodness of one another, and that when you look at people and you say they’re made in the image of God, and sometimes God’s image may be more intact in them than you. And to have that respect and reverence and thankfulness that you’re able to learn from the goodness of one another, but at the same time, because of their goodness, the knowledge—pursuing knowledge of the beauty of that diversity, what do they have to offer? What is the richness of their cultures? What are their grievances? What are their aspirations? How do I empathize with them?  

And when we build on that knowledge, I believe we have a capacity for self-control, to be respectful, to be kind, and not to just say what’s in our mind or just walk away or cancel them out when they offend us. You have that control that goes beyond our emotions. And that self-control gives us the ability to persevere during tough times when we can’t stand one another, when geopolitical issues and political issues, these tend to make us want to walk away. That gives us the ability to persevere through that time, and those who persevere through that time will have a sense of godliness that goes beyond our mortal frailties and to really be caring and loving, even when it’s impossible. It’s almost like an unconditional love. And that godliness leads to mutual affection, then we’ll surely see affection for one another. We care, and people notice that, and that the mutual affection leads to love—a love that can conquer even the deepest of hate and the most challenging of times.  

And that’s what we try to train our young people in, is that you need to be setting a standard. When Muslims are being attacked in our country by extremist groups, it was Christians and Buddhists and Hindus who stood around the mosque and said, you have to go through us. These are young people who have now mutual affection and love for the other that they were putting—willing to put their life on the line for the other. Fighting for justice is far more effective, and we’re doing it across communal lines, as opposed to fighting by ourselves and having mediocre results.  

So, I believe there’s hope, I believe there’s momentum, and the next generation needs to be at the forefront and not token representative seats at the table. 

KARAM: Thank you very much, indeed, Prashan. One almost wants to stop right there, because that is such a positive image. And I think that work is absolutely essential. (Laughter.) 

STARES: I was ready to clap. 

KARAM: Yeah, but we do need to go on a wee bit. So maybe, Paul, to come back to you specifically on aspects related to the reconciliation and religions—and we will also hear more, so don’t worry, Prashan will continue to inspire us—Paul, what are some of the thoughts from your work and research and surveys on the reconciliation aspects of religion? What difference do religions make to reconciliation? 

STARES: Well, following Prashan’s sort of uplifting exhortation to us all, I feel rather hesitant to be such a downer about this. (Laughter.) But from my perspective, there has been—and I hope I’m actually wrong about this, and I invite people from the audience to challenge this observation—but you know, since, I think the early 2000s, certainly when I worked at the U.S. Institute of Peace and just after 9/11, and there was, I think, real optimism and momentum that religion could be harnessed in a positive way for peacemaking and reconciliation.  

And the Institute had a very prominent, effective effort on religion and peacemaking. I think they were—they felt sort of empowered, because there had been, you know, breakthrough in Northern Ireland, in the Balkans, where religion—I think interfaith reconciliation was underway, to some extent the Oslo Peace Accords, and some ground-based organizations were really, I think, making a difference in trying to bridge the divide between Israelis and Palestinians.  

And so I think there was a lot of hope then and, of course, a lot of academic work, and particularly at the two Kroc Centers affiliated with Catholic universities, colleges in America, another, I think, factor here. 

There was a lot of, I think, optimism about how religious actors could play a positive role in peacemaking. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a complete sea change in that in the last certainly four or five years, and I think the events around October 7 and Gaza has accelerated this and deepened this. And I see actually the opposite, the growing sense that religious actors or actors who are harnessing religion in a way to sort of counter peacemaking, to undermine it, to set back reconciliation, and particularly in the Middle East—I can’t speak authoritatively for, say, between India and Pakistan, for instance, and elsewhere—but I certainly see it in the Middle East, sort of deep disenchantment about the prospects of interfaith reconciliation and efforts.  

So I know there are efforts by grassroots organizations to make a difference. But they are, from my perspective, really fighting against the tide here, and I think it has a great deal to do with the ease of which social media can be mobilized to incite people to encourage religious tensions and prejudices and to emphasize the other on all these very destructive things. And so I’m, frankly, quite pessimistic about—to the extent that religious organizations can play a positive, difference on many of these conflicts I mentioned at the outset. But please prove me wrong.  

KARAM: Thank you very much. My goodness, what a shift, eh? (Laughter.) 

Now from there, Josefina, give us some of your own insights on the aspect of reconciliation, religions and reconciliation. 

ALVAREZ: Thank you.  

I think, Paul, what you’re what you’re referring to is quite important in our discussion, because there is this ripeness that that is required from, you know, an avid conflict to move into a peacemaking phase. And if that ripeness is not there, I think that conflict resolution efforts tend to fail.  

What our experience has been as a research university has been to accompany civil society organizations in the midst of conflict in their peacebuilding efforts, recognizing that our job is not to bring the conflict parties to the table, but during armed confrontations in both cases that I was telling you about it, both in the Philippines and in Colombia, the university has been accompanying different workshops, different peacebuilding measures.  

I do believe—and to go back more directly to us as question on reconciliation, I do believe that our spiritual commitments and our mission at the university is an important guide for us when we approach topics of peacebuilding and peacemaking and reconciliation.  

It is very tough. I grew up in Medellín in Colombia during the toughest times of the war. It is difficult to sit across your former enemies and it is difficult to work together. There is a lot of, of course, prejudices, but there’s also a lot of fear based on your experiences, if you have been a victim of war, and I have found that especially to build trust and to see—you know, Azza, you were talking about to see the children of God sitting across from that table—it is important to perceive, to sense, not just to think about it, but to believe that there is a connection among our human community around the world, that we are part of the same community, and that political differences, and very often also religious differences, divide us, but that there is, I think at least for us, a faith that allows us to see in our former enemies our partners today. 

And it is in that spirit, Azza, that I believe our monitoring work is important. Because you want monitors. You want people who accompany civil society organizations, victims, but also former combatants, those who are part of the reintegration process, are able to accompany you in a continuous way. 

What is happening right now with—we were discussing last night, what is happening right now with the freezing of the federal funds is, of course, really detrimental to our work. This is a very delicate moment around the world, and we know that monitors and supporters of peacebuilding in the midst of conflict, as well as during the implementation of the Peace Accords, we need to be there. We need to be available. People need to trust that we will be supporting them and that we will not abandon them, and we need to monitor the situation.  

So this is a delicate moment for us in peacebuilding. We need to find other ways to not let people down who have been going through wars, well, fifty years, sixty years. But of course, if you look back in history, we’re talking about centuries. So we need to find a way. 

KARAM: Thank you. Thank you, Josefina.  

On that note, I’m curious before I come to the now expected to uplift, please, Prashan—(laughter)—in your own work, are you impacted by some of these cuts that we have we’re seeing around us? If you’re not, how come? 

DE VISSER: Please remind me to get to that.  

KARAM: OK, go for it.  

DE VISSER: One thing, so when we’ve started doing the work, we realized an understanding of reconciliation was important to give us the stamina to persevere through difficult times and all the reasons that you feel like you want to give up. And for us, the understanding of reconciliation came from this Hebrew word, tikkun olam, which, in my understanding, it’s almost three English words coming together and working together as one, is heal, repair and transform. These are not synonyms to one another. These are three words all working together.  

And so what we realized is, if reconciliation is to happen, there needs to be a healing and acknowledging of the pain that has been caused to one another, acknowledging the pain that you are in in order for you to heal from that.  

But that’s not reconciliation. That’s just getting started. There needs to be a repairing of the broken structures, and there needs to be repairing of the structural violences and the structural racisms within our society. If not, old wounds are going to get reopened and new wounds are going to get created, and your healing becomes a joke. And many people because they thought this healing was ended, this was all, and we are now out of the woods, everything’s fine, when they realize that the broken structures are causing new wounds, they got depressed and they lost and they walked away from the process.  

But when you understand that this is a long journey that we need to now work together to make sure—if I truly was serious about my apology, then I would be serious about working together to correct the brokenness in our society, that we can all have a just and thriving society. But it doesn’t end there. We then need to have a collective vision of a transformed society.  

You and I have inherited certain things, but what we leave behind for our children, that’s all on us, and therefore we now need to work together for a collective vision for a transformed society. We don’t need to leave it the way it was. The bare minimum will eventually lead to sliding back into conflict and backsliding into even worse context, but a propelling forward to a collective vision, I feel, keeps you motivated and engaged.  

And for us, when we work with young people, what we’re trying to say is, this is your future. This is what you’re going to hand over to your children, and what’s your collective vision like? And that collective vision is not possible if you don’t address the structural violence and the brokenness in your society, if you don’t have the courage to speak out against injustice and brokenness.  

And also, it’s not possible if you relinquish your responsibility and hand it over to the religious leadership or the political leadership or the large INGOs or the international funding. This is your cause. This is your future. You take responsibility. And so when you take that responsibility, then you build an ownership and a stamina to engage.  

We just did our numbers, and we realized that in the last five years, across the fourteen countries, we’ve engaged half a million youth in five years and 50,000 new young members have joined the movement and 10,000 volunteers who contribute at least two hours of their time of documented work to mentor another generation. Impossible to do if there wasn’t ownership and an understanding of the gravity of the work ahead.  

And we’ve been so inspired by that saying, not much funding. In fact, we decided to stay away from large funding, government funding, because, one, we don’t have the time to fill all this paperwork. (Laughter.) And two, we’re not going to get it anyway, because it’s too complicated and all that.  

And on top of that, if some agency may come up with what my country needs right now and tell me a project, and tell me to do that project, because that’s the—and I know that’s not important right now, but I’ll do it because I need the funding and I just need to survive, and then I just give a proposal of the five months or a five-year program trying to address a twenty-year conflict. So it’s better for us to find sustainable funding. 

And we have worked on working on our diaspora in all of our countries, despite all the negatives. The good thing is, some of our best and brightest left our country and have thrived in their new homes. And we said, this is a way to give back. You don’t trust the governments in our country, you don’t trust larger organizations, but you can trust a new generation. Come and see what they’re doing. Invest in this. That’s been more sustainable. 

And we’ve created businesses along the social movements to ensure that we are sustainable, that we’re not dependent. And if there’s more funding, that’s just to expand, but it’s not to survive, to keep day-to-day operations. 

And so when this happened, we didn’t see it happening. No one saw it happening, but we knew this is not sustainable. This is our country’s cause. What if our country doesn’t have the attention of the donor? Eventually they walk away. And we’ve seen that walk away happen quite often. Our teams in Afghanistan will tell you what the walk away feels like, and so we need to plan for our own futures. We have to proactively engage. We’re not doing this because the West has told us, here is a standard of justice and unity and reconciliation. This is standard for us and our future. This is our nation’s future at stake. Where there is help, we’ll take it gladly, and we’ll be so grateful. But we have to march on, because our children’s future is at stake.  

KARAM: Hallelujah. Sorry. (Laughter.) 

Thank you very much, Prashan. One gets, quite rightly, especially that part about how you create the local ownership and you keep it local. And when you reach out, you reach out with your own vision, and you keep it. 

Now, I think those who will remember some of the stories from the Second World War will remember that today we have peace between or we had, having still peace between nations who were at war with one another, and collaboration and cooperation. So there was a common and shared vision. And I think the question is, how come we’re seeing so many breakups? How come we’re seeing so much division at a time when we need most. So there are also trends historically that we need to keep in mind.  

And those trends, as you said before, we learn from history that we never learn from history. One of those trends is precisely the fluctuation in the roles of religions. But is it realistic to assume that if we engage more with the—which by the way, there’s no such thing as religion. It’s religions and they’re very, very plentiful. And if we understand that religions are diverse and plentiful, then we also understand that engaging them has the pluses and the minuses. There is no such thing as it’s all a smooth sailing to peace, but there will be fluctuations.  

And thank you for mentioning the context of the Middle East. It’s not only in the Middle East anymore. I think we can see—as you presented, Paul; and as, Josephina, you spoke to—there isn’t a single part of the world in which religion and peacebuilding and war don’t actually happen simultaneously. So it might be a good idea to ponder that as we go forward. It is not to deter from religious engagements, but it is to be more savvy and more wise and more inclusive, even though that word is becoming very problematic right now, but yes, to be more inclusive in how we engage with these issues.  

Now we will move on to a few minutes of Q&A, so if you don’t mind raising your hands up so I can see how many there are? Excellent. Can we go to this table first, and I’m going to go against the rules I’m given and ask the two people on this same table to ask their question simultaneously before I take one, one, one, one, because I want to make sure as many of you as possible get a chance to ask the questions. Please identify your name and your affiliation and—et cetera. Yes? 

Q: Galen Carey with the National Association of Evangelicals.  

So I’m wondering if any of you could speak to what extent U.S. government funding has been helpful or unhelpful in the architecture of peacemaking and collaboration with religious groups around the world. 

KARAM: Thank you. 

Please. 

Q: I’m Steve Schneck with the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and my question is specifically to Paul.  

I wonder if we could valuably draw a line between religions and religious nationalism in regards to the conflict that we’re seeing here. And I wonder if you might address that, thinking about places like Burma and India and Turkey, and you know what Putin has done with the Orthodox Church in Russia, and so on and so forth.  

KARAM: Thank you.  

Maybe we begin with you, Paul, since the question was directed to you, but I do want the other colleagues also to speak to the U.S. influence and impact. Paul. 

STARES: Yeah, let me try to give my thoughts on both questions. 

But firstly, the last question, I was acutely aware when I was sort of giving my sort of very broad brush overview that I was making very sort of blanket statements about, you know, what are the drivers of conflict. And I think, you know, when we look specifically at the Middle East, there are definitely intercommunal religious-based conflicts. You know, much of the larger context is driven by you mentioned religious nationalists. I would call it ethnonationalist drivers, particularly over land, and identity, and so I’m wary about, as I say—and I think Azza sort of also reminded us to not sort of have this one-size-fits-all kind of approach to both diagnosing areas where religion plays some role in some way, positive and negative, but also in how we sort of harness religion in a positive direction. So I take your point that I think much of this has a major nationalist component. 

In terms of just funding quickly, one of my great concerns about what is happening to USAID at the moment is that while people have sort of focused on the impact on U.S. humanitarian assistance around the world, which, by the way, also is extremely important for not only conflict prevention, but also reconciliation, is that much of USAID’s effort to promote peace, particularly to support local peacebuilding organizations, some of which do pursue religious peacemaking methods and techniques, won’t now be funded, and I’m worried that that sort of vacuum will be filled by actors that may be religious, but may have their own very narrow agendas.  

And I’m particularly worried about that. USAID programs, despite what Mr. Musk might say, do go through a lot of vetting and about, you know, how U.S. taxpayers’ money should be spent. And I’m worried that some of those—that kind of oversight mechanisms will potentially go away and a lot of people will suffer as a consequence. 

KARAM: Thank you, Paul. 

Maybe just very quickly to address the question of the difference made by U.S. support to the different peace processes.  

Shall we go ahead to you, Josefina? 

ALVAREZ: Well, thank you for your questions.  

To go back a little bit where we were discussing before, so as monitors of the implementation, we received our mandates from the peace accord. So we don’t receive our mandates from our funders, none of them, but the conflict parties during the negotiations that very often we provide technical advice to, one of the technical advices that I also want to share with you is that you have a 47 percent rate of success, higher if you have monitors of the implementation of any accords that you sign. Those monitors need to be impartial, but then again, engaged. They have to believe in the process. They have to support you, especially in moments of crisis. And the crisis are not just in the face of negotiation. The crisis happened during the implementation process. So we have only been invited, as University of Notre Dame both the mandates in the Bangsamoro peace accord in Mindanao and in the 2016 Colombian peace accord, says a company has helped us measure and follow up the implementation of this accord, keep the government accountable, be a transparency guarantee for civil society, both victims, former combatants, offenders, et cetera, help the international community make decisions about prioritization.  

So one of our main funders has been the State Department, not USAID in this case, because of the information that we provide. The only way we can also be independent is if we are not funded by one single organization. So of course, the University of Notre Dame invests in this process as part of our mission. And I think it’s important to remember that in the end, we are accountable to those who signed the peace accord, and this cut or this freeze or the review process in which we find ourselves has a direct impact, because as monitors, we’re basically taking this moment as learning from our COVID experience. How do you monitor that which doesn’t happen?  

So for us, it’s a methodological challenge, but I think it’s important to be able to answer your question in a much more informed ways in a couple of weeks saying these are the programs that are not taking place. USAID was, of course, a very important source of funding for humanitarian assistance, but also for justice programs—justice programs that have everything to do with inclusion, participation, ownership of civil society. They are the ones who, in the end, sustain the peace process through decades.  

So we’re hoping to be able to answer your question better, but what we’re seeing right now is the disappointment, and I think that the trust that civil society and people had around the world in our work has suffered already, and I am afraid that we are also paying a high price in our reputation to accompany those processes. 

KARAM: Thank you, Josefina. 

Prashan, quick thoughts. 

DE VISSER: Quick thoughts. On the funding, there’s definitely been a lot of great work done. And when you realize the generosity, especially in this country—I was yesterday speaking at UNHCR, and especially on refugees and displaced persons. Over 56 percent of their budget comes from this country, and a lot of lion’s share over the years, and there is a need to gratitude and appreciate the work that’s been done.  

But at the same time, it’s important on our side to evaluate, and saying: Are we working towards sustainability? Are we working responsibly? And one thing that happens is, when you have large funding coming from outside, there’s a complacency that happens within the local communities, and as a result, we’re taking away our own ability to be proactive and engaged. So I’m seeing every crisis is an opportunity. Let’s get our act together. How do we work better within our context?  

But at same time as they’re freezing and reviewing, I hope the authorities will see the amazing projects that are happening that are crucial for the world, for many of the crises around the world, but also reevaluate if there is waste happening, if there’s things that actually decrease in the capacity of local groups, if there are funding that’s been used in a way that—because and then reevaluate that, that would be a good opportunity as well.  

KARAM: Thank you.  

And I think that that focus might be helpful for us going through the rest of the day, that every crisis is also an opportunity.  

Just to make sure, because there’s been a gentleman who’s been very polite, and since you have the microphone right there, please go ahead.  

Where are the next tables? And then we need to go to that table. So just heads up.  

Please go ahead, sir. Identify yourself. 

Q: Thank you. Galen Guengerich, most recently, senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Church up the street and now affiliated with the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. 

A question for Prashan. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britain, wrote a book about twenty-five years ago titled The Dignity of Difference, in which he observed that economic superpowers tend to have relatively short lifespans, a few hundred years, whereas the great religions endure for thousands of years. And he says that what makes a culture invulnerable is the compassion it shows for the vulnerable.  

But a corollary of his comparison is that the kind of change you’re talking about takes a very long time, generations. So my question is, how do you build into your process the patience and the understanding that these bridges are easy to build and—hard to build and easy to destroy, and that deep, systemic change is going to take generations, so fifty years, not a month or a quarter or even a year?  

KARAM: Thank you very much.  

And just to take one more, if you don’t mind, one more question from the table right there, the gentleman right there, and then we’ll answer to the two. Thank you. 

Q: Thank you. Salam Al-Marayati, Muslim Public Affairs Council.  

You know, I think we tend to look over there in terms of diagnosing problems, but I want to look at what our problems are here in the United States, and our perceptions of religious groups overseas. And the United States has gone to war, especially in the Middle East, and for example, in Iraq had divided that country into three regions along ethnic and religious lines. So it seems that there’s a lot to discuss in terms of U.S. foreign policy and groups like this, the Council on Foreign Relations and religious subcommittees, in terms of our own perceptions of whether we need to look at the world in terms of the unity of religions or dividing it among religions. And especially in Muslim-majority countries, we’re still viewed as a Judeo-Christian force, not by their words, but by words of people here in the United States. So what kind of changes do we need to make here to be more effective in religious peacemaking? 

KARAM: Thank you very much, Salam.  

All right, let’s do the same thing again. Start with you, Paul. 

STARES: Whoa. I was hoping to have some time to think about that.  

Well, I think your question was addressed to Prashan, but I thought it was an excellent question, because there are essentially two timetables here. There’s the need to make sort of quick progress, to demonstrate and build confidence that you’re heading in the right direction, and to show that there are results on the ground. Otherwise, people will give up. You know, we all have attention deficit disorder in some level, in terms of—and we want to see progress and—but as you rightly point out, it’s going to be very, very slow. 

You know, look at Northern Ireland, for instance. You know, even, I don’t know how many decades after the fighting, we’re still confronting serious sort of prejudices there, and it’s going to take a long, long time.  

But this question is the one that most intrigues me, and it’s about, you know, what do we need to do at home to make ourselves better abroad, in terms of how we act, intervene, design effective policies. And I’m frankly struggling to point to what in particular, certainly in a structural sense, should be done. I think in terms of leadership, and moral leadership in particular, there’s no substitute for that. And you know, we look to the president to play that role, and speaking personally, I’m worried about where we may be going in that respect. A lot of people were very critical of his predecessor in seemingly sort of giving sort of biased or insufficient compassion for the Palestinians, particularly. And but you know, I just worry about where we may be going in terms of that kind of moral leadership from the U.S. and playing a positive role. I’ll leave it there. 

But I want to maybe come back to you and if I can think of something in particular, but I encourage others to answer this question, because I think it’s an important one. 

KARAM: And it’s actually—the question is at the heart of this workshop and every work related to foreign policy, and has always been. So we do need to keep revisiting it. Thank you very much for raising it.  

Now, I know that there was a question directed specifically to Prashan. But as the chair, I will abuse the privilege and say I like when he finishes us, because that’s—no, so Josefina, go for it, before I come to you, Prashan. (Laughter.) 

ALVAREZ: Thank you.  

STARES: I’m the Debbie downer here. (Laughter.) 

KARAM: No, no, it’s different. It’s gradations. We need to balance each other. I haven’t spoken yet, so just you wait.  

Go ahead. 

ALVAREZ: Thank you so much.  

I think that the question of both generational change but also systemic change is also one that we look at in a very committed manner when we accompany implementation of peace accord. Peace accords tend to focus on institutional change. They are contracts. They’re assigned between governments and illegal arms organizations to sign the piece, and most of the transformations and the reforms that you find there really relate to how do you change institutions in order to change deeper behaviors, attitudes in society? Our hope is that that institutional change opens a window of opportunity in which we can engage also in change that relates to interpersonal relationships, cultural change mostly related to, of course, longer phases. That has to do a lot with our values. It has to do a lot with educational reform.  

So we see that that institutional change very often opens the doors for interpersonal community and cultural change. And this is where I think that these keywords in the title of our workshop come together. We’re talking about peacemaking that opens the door for reconciliation and peacebuilding, but they are different types of process. And I think we believe that—listen, all of us are from the University of Notre Dame, the Kroc Institute. We have one of our most, I would say, admired scholar practitioners, John Paul, it takes—we should calculate it takes basically the same amount of time for peacebuilding and reconciliation as it took you during the conflict. So if you’re looking at a conflict that has taken around fifty to sixty years, a civil war that travels maybe twenty to thirty years, then we are, for the next twenty to thirty years, engaged after the signing of the peace accord in that time. I think it’s a good window for us to be ready to both deliver right now. 

Of course, we need to make sure that people believe in what we’re saying, that they see their results, that they perceive a benefit in their own well-being. And at the same time, we need patience. And this is where I also think that bipartisan support, that continuity in policies, in foreign policy, is important because we need to be looking at the next thirty years in peacebuilding. 

KARAM: Thank you so much. Unless, of course, we’re building rivieras, we might not get that long-term perspective. 

But in the meantime, Prashan, you spoke—and Josefina just stressed this point—about the importance of ownership of a process and that being integral to the long-term continuity that I think religious institutions in particular are very adept in that they’re in this. They create the societies. They’re not just part of it, but they are the very fabric of it, in most instances.  

Now, from your own perspective, Prashan, given the work that you’ve been doing, especially with the younger generation, what would you want to say as answers?  

DE VISSER: It’s very important to have no delusion in the fact that if these challenges have taken place over decades, there is no fix all solution that overnight or even one election cycle is going to solve the problems. And if you put all your hope in that, you’re bound to be more disappointed that you might lose your capacity to engage further.  

But I also believe, I recently just published a book called The Phoenix Generation: The Role of Youth in Transforming Conflict, and what I wanted to do was look at 200 grassroots movements throughout the world in the last 200 years, and looked at have they had an impact to transform society. And then I’ve identified the big five grassroots movements that change the world. So you have President Mandela’s movement of the ANC. You have Gandhi’s movement for independence. You have Wilberforce and the movement to abolish slavery in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. You have the suffragette movement for the rights of women to franchise. And then you also have Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement here.  

And I started trying to look at what are some ingredients that all of them had in common, and how were they able to make change. And the reality is, they didn’t take seventy years for change. It’s about twenty, twenty-five-year process where they really saw—and from that, well, Mandela took a little bit more at the ANC, but he was in prison for twenty-something years or forty-something years.  

So but when we ask the question, how is that possible, how is that timeline expedited, it’s once there was definitely the ownership of people embracing the cause, and they’re marching towards that. They have a clear end game of what are we working towards. It’s not trying to manage the elements of the conflict right now. It’s where are we heading to, what’s the vision. And for that to happen, what are the small battles we need to win now that will help the morale and keep the troops, the peacebuilding troops energized to keep going and celebrate those victories? 

And when you do that, I feel the momentum is built. And you have to have strategic ways of here are the small battles, here’s the end game, and then how are we building our competencies and our capacities as time goes by to be more effective at the next battle and the next battle. 

And looking for those political opportunities in time in all of our countries, at a moment in time, it’s a prime opportunity to attack for change. But more often than not, civil society is not organized to pounce on that time. And then they’re playing catch up. We’re always reacting to the problem. Like was mentioned, it’s pointless once the violence has started to try and do peacebuilding work. You have to see it coming and start engaging.  

The reason that we want to engage in the U.S. is that people who’ve been through civil wars and seen the brutality of civil wars, we’re looking at your country, and we’re saying the red flags are all over the place, but most of your countrymen don’t seem to see it’s a problem. And so we are trying to engage now, because now it’s what matters, the next five years or immediately. And so that’s—and understanding the ebbs and flows in conflict.  

Dr. John Paul Lederach is my mentor at Notre Dame, and he wrote the forward for my book, and he always says, look at the ebbs and flows of conflict. See how this has happened. History has repeated itself. But how would you engage now proactively? Don’t wait till it happens. Don’t wait till donors know that it’s happening. Because donors know it’s happening five years after it happened. So if you wait for the funding to be available, you’re wasting time. So how are you reading the ground and how are you mobilizing? And you have a mobilizing strength to engage right now. Those are the ways that we see it. 

KARAM: Fantastic.  

OK, there’s two women over there, one after the other. So if you don’t mind, please—yes. Thank you, Samah. 

Q: Hi. Samah Norquist from USAID. 

Prashan, you just reminded me of something very important. You mentioned that 40 percent of funding for UNHCR comes from USAID, and I’m looking at what’s happening today, when you look at social media, that I’m stunned of the amount of attention that USAID has done, which was a big problem for us, because we suck at branding, right? So we give money overseas. Nobody knows that the United States is the highest funder for UNDP, UNHCR, and faith-based organizations.  

So my recommendations are—I don’t have a question. I have a recommendation from a policy perspective, and maybe join Paul’s downer club. In terms of making yourselves known makes a difference to policymakers, do not assume that people know what you do. They don’t. Americans, people don’t know the role, that it’s not our government just giving money to people. It is actually faith-based groups in the United States that care about what’s happening overseas.  

And you need to mention that you partnered with USAID. You do good work because it’s American faith-based organizations do well overseas and help overseas, and how that impacts the United States’ national interest.  

The second recommendation, which maybe you guys are not going to like, are some of the terms that for people in the center right on the right don’t resonate, and I mean peacebuilding, reconciliation. Those are terms that are perceived to be more to the left, because it’s all about, for lack of better terms, lovey-dovey terms, in the reality of policymaking at least. So I would just encourage to think out of the box of objectives that entails peacebuilding and reconciliation and dialogue, because I think you should highlight the differences between people and groups that you work with, but it’s not just because we want to love each other and we want to understand each other. What is the objective of doing that? Thank you. 

KARAM: Ani.  

Q: Good morning. Ani Zonneveld from Muslims for Progressive Values. 

My question is to Prashan. You had—you mentioned the businesses or the sustainability of organizations in the various countries that you work in. I’d like to know, do you create businesses around these global units as a way to sustain themselves?  

And then, number two, a follow up to that, are these businesses set up cross-sectional, like, you know, the interfaith and interethnic groups working together in business as a way to build that friendship, a deep friendship and relationships?  

KARAM: Thank you very much.  

Now I’m really sorry, but we have only a few minutes, and I want to make sure that we hear from Prashan. But I also want to give the floor to each of the speakers for their final. 

So maybe this time we start with you, Prashan. Go for it. Ha-ha. (Laughter.) 

DE VISSER: I was missing one more component from the previous question. I’ll quickly add that. In the sense of if you invest the amount of money and the strategic engagement that these conflicts and wars have inherited towards the peacebuilding process and initiatives, then you can expedite the timeline. And if you can invest in key leaders on the ground, as opposed to random projects that are shorter, key leaders who are transformational, that’s our model, is who are these leaders who have the resilience, who have the vision, and who are willing to say, in fact, let’s invest in them, they are the change?  

I jokingly say I’m in the mining industry. Everybody’s saying, what do you mean? I mine for something far more valuable than gold, diamonds, and rupees, but we mine for a new generation of leaders in the most—diamonds in the rough. In some of the most devastated places in the world, they still have a capacity to hope and have a vision and the resilience to serve. They’re already made of good metal. How do we invest in them? Add fuel to the fire on them. Strategic investments, that will help the timeline go faster.  

In regards to the business idea, that’s something we felt. We do create two versions of it. One is we have our own Shark Tank. It’s something we copied from the States, that show. We knew that people who are in the nonprofit sector are not good businesspeople. We’re losing money. And when people are supposed to really do nonprofit work are doing business, it ends up hurting the organization’s vision and all that.  

So we started doing the Shark Tank, where we invite young entrepreneurs who already doing businesses to come in, and we would get our donors, who also happen to be business leaders, to come in and invest in those businesses. But we take an equity share for the peacebuilding movement, for your work. And those guys, their businesses are more likely to succeed than these nonprofit guys trying to do business, and we’re able to benefit from that.  

But at the same time, we started looking at what are our core competencies that we have within the nonprofit that can be monetized. So for example, in Sri Lanka, we speak all the major languages of the island, so we provided a translation service to corporates, to nonprofits, to INGOs. We became like the largest translation unit provided. In fact, the Canadian government had some English movies that they wanted us to dub into Sinhalese and TandemTamil, and they paid us very well for it. And so we had that. So what are the competencies we have? 

And then corporates in our part of the world are saying, hey, people of different religions are now working together, but they don’t really know how to, and would you all come and provide training for that? Of course, but you pay us. And so those kinds of initiatives within your core competencies make it more sustainable. That’s how we’ve engaged so far. 

KARAM: Thank you very much, Prashan. 

OK, maybe just a few concluding words in terms of going forward on some of these issues of faith, peacebuilding, and reconciliation. 

Paul. 

STARES: I always seem to follow Prashan here. (Laughter.) 

I think my main takeaway here is, if I’m looking for a motivational speaker, I’m going to call up this guy, fly him in. (Laughter.) 

Seriously, though I think what you said about doing better at championing and advertising, marketing, whatever, what we do in a positive way is very important. You know, you say, well, USAID, so much of it is out of sight. It’s out of mind. We just don’t get—and I think that’s very important. It reminds me of many folks from the intelligence community say you only hear about our failures. You never hear about our success.  

It’s the same also in the conflict prevention area and peacebuilding. You know, we’re terrible at trying to describe the positive things we do and our, you know, minor triumphs, because we’re trying to avert something. And if you averted it, there’s no evidence that that you actually made any difference. And that’s a constant challenge for all of us, I think, in this area. 

But there are ways I think we can do a better job of drawing attention to the good things we do, and we don’t, I think, put enough attention on that. And that would be probably my main takeaway here and recommendation for everybody. 

KARAM: Thank you. 

STARES: Think about, you know, where we have succeeded, the positive efforts we’ve made, even if it’s in the short term, and how we can build on them.  

KARAM: Perfect. Thank you very much, Paul. 

Josefina. 

ALVAREZ: Yeah, thank you.  

To speak also about our main takeaways, besides in my introduction to my next motivational conference, I think it’s important to—so again, because, also because of my background, because of having been brought up in a war, I am fascinated by what works. I’m fascinated by peacemaking when people are able to, you know, shake each other’s hands after years of fighting each other. I’m fascinated by that human capacity to heal, but also to transcend, to find community, to find spirituality.  

And that’s why I love my job, which is looking at when peace accords actually succeed. There is no war that will be finished purely on military grounds. We know that. The only way to finish wars, even if it’s temporarily, is, of course, through peace accords. So our efforts and our energy should be really geared towards understanding how best to design them, how best to sign them, but how best to implement them.  

And here, of course, what we have found in our research is that peace accords benefit society as a whole, not just the former combatants. We have higher rates of educational achievement, better access to health, better access to education. We improve gender equality. And I think they do contribute greatly to stability and stabilization. It is, of course, our belief that a more stable world, a more stable not just Colombia-Venezuela border, or Mindanao Island, is important for the United States. I am convinced of that. But I also think it’s important for all of us, of all our nationalities, of all our religious affiliations. We all have a commitment to this work. So I’ll definitely take that and also rejoice in seeing so many of you here working in your various ways to contribute to this larger goal. 

KARAM: Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.  

I think we’ve heard plenty. Before we clap, a couple of points that perhaps we can take and reflect on later. We were asked some very important questions. We heard some plenty wisdom and inspiration. Yes, we do need to focus on that which works. We also might need to take a moment to reflect on that which is not working and why it hasn’t worked. And perhaps this is an opportunity to do so. 

A certain sense of self-reflexivity with a certain heavy dose, or a healthy dose of humiliation—not humiliation—forget that, I didn’t say that, scrap that—humility.  

STARES: Humility. 

KARAM: What’s the other word? 

ALVAREZ: Humility. 

KARAM: OK. Forget that. Never happened. Retract. Humility, a dose of humility that we would all do very well with.  

There is one of the questions that I’ll take that I think I heard beautiful answers from each of the panelists from is, what is it that we need to do different here in this amazing country that many of us have adopted as our own, many of us are born into and don’t realize the remarkable advantage and gift and blessing of it? But given that we are committed to this nation, what is it that we can learn from what we’re going through right now, and what is the lessons—what are the lessons of humility required by the religious institutions in particular, who never do wrong, but who might want to just take a page out of each other’s institutional and historical and political memory? What is it that we need to learn? Perhaps the United States is standing on a very critical moment where it has plenty more to learn from the others around the world. Could this be the moment? Could this be an opportunity? If it is, we’ve got some amazing talents that we’ve supported over many centuries. Let’s learn from one another, and let’s take that humility to heart, because it is ultimately what faith is about.  

Thank you all very much. Please join me in thanking these amazing people. (Applause.) 

(END) 

This is an uncorrected transcript. 

FASKIANOS: I want to invite our panel on for the next session. Burt, over to you.  

Burt Visotzky is moderating this session on “International Religious Freedom and Expression.” So thank you all. 

VISOTZKY: Good morning. 

I want to start by thanking the Council on Foreign Relations and I especially want to thank—I don’t see her in the room—all the way in the back, Irina Faskianos, for the incredible amounts of work she does to prepare this. (Applause.) And her faithful team, yes. (Applause.) 

Our session right now is on international religious freedom and expression. This is a complicated topic and I’m going to try and frame it in two different ways, although I’m going to ask each of our panelists to make an opening statement.  

So I’m asking for opening statements of six and a half minutes. OK. Not more, not less. But the first thing I noticed looking at our panel is we have three panelists here, none of whom are currently living in the country where they were born or where their family is from, and I want to know how your religious belief has affected or not your leaving your home country. I know in one case it actually is a very real phenomenon.  

The second point I wanted to make is that each of you has a particular world view. So,—let me introduce our panelists.  

On my far left, although that’s not a political statement—just on my far left, Wai Wai Nu is the founder and executive director of the Women Peace Network and a visiting scholar at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley. Are you still at Berkeley?  

NU: Recently left. 

VISOTZKY: OK. 

NU: I’m in another institution. 

VISOTZKY: Right. And then next to her is my brother Mohamed Elsanousi. Mohamed is a commissioner on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and his full-time job is the executive director of the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers. 

And then, finally, right next to me is Nazila Ghanea. She is the special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief at the United Nations, and her side gig is she’s a professor of international human rights law at the University of Oxford.  

So, Wai Wai has a very particular instance about her place in the world and her family coming from Myanmar—from Burma. I don’t know which is the right thing to say, Myanmar or Burma.  

NU: It’s fine. We use it interchangeably. 

VISOTZKY: I’m just old enough—I’m old enough to remember Burma Shave. So— 

NU: It will take two minutes to explain why, Myanmar and Burma. So I won’t take this time from you. (Laughs.) 

VISOTZKY: Thank you.  

And Mohamed—so she’s really a particular country case. Mohamed is a commissioner on the United States Commission. Mohamed’s world view is a national one as a member of the United States Commission. And then finally, Naz’s view is U.N. wide, which means you represent the entire world to us.  

So those two things will kind of, I hope, inform our discussion. But for an opening statement I want to start with Wai Wai because you have lots to say about—and I do want to point out, if you haven’t read her full bio that part of Wai Wai’s education was seven years in prison. So maybe you also want to reflect on that and what you learned in prison.  

NU: Oh, thank you very much, and it is an honor to be here. And thank you, Council of Foreign Relations, for inviting me to speak on this panel.  

I come from Burma and I have been in the U.S. for the past six years. As Burt mentioned, I had to flee the country. We have a military coup right now, which started in 2021, but I had to leave even before the military coup because I have been actively along with my organizations working on justice and accountability for the atrocity crimes committed against the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities in Burma.  

So the military actually chased me, you know, in my office, raided my office, and I was under surveillance, so I had to flee. So I first came to the United States in 2018 to study at the UC Berkeley LLM. I did my masters of law, which I was deprived of when I was put in prison. So I was very privileged and fortunate to be able to continue my education and complete it. 

I was hoping to go back but then we had a military coup and now I’m on their top list. So there is no return home at the moment. But part of the reason that I have been involved in this kind of work—you know, human rights work, which includes religious freedom, is because our country has been under military rule directly or indirectly, fully or partially over the past seven decades, and the military has been using religion and ethnicity as a tool to control or to manipulate society so that they can control power.  

So they’ve pitted against us. At the same time, they have created this Buddhist Burman nationalism. That has become one of the most critical factors for Burma as a whole to move forward to a more open and democratic, pluralistic society.  

Through this Burmese national—Buddhist Burmanization process, they have created a culture of religious and ethnic discrimination against all other religious and ethnic groups other than Buddhists or even among the Buddhists if they are not from the same sect as the Burmese military prefer, and specifically beyond that, they have also actively targeted different religious minorities such as Rohingya or Chin Christian.  

In my case, I’m a Rohingya Muslim so our case is the worst example, extreme example, of the religious persecution that goes beyond discrimination, and that becomes, you know, international crimes such as crimes against humanity or genocide. 

In Burma’s case, the Rohingya case has been listed on the USCIRF report for years now. So as member of the Rohingya I was targeted more than other human rights activists, democracy activists, and my father was also a part of the democracy movement. He was a close ally to the Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in the previous dictatorship fighting against the military dictatorship.  

As an elected parliamentarian he was targeted by the junta. For other politicians, they would only arrest one per individual but in our family case they arrested the entire family because we are Rohingya.  

So even if you are a politician, if you belong to this religious minority, you will be targeted more than others and that’s how we were arrested. I was seventeen, eighteen years old. I wasn’t a political leader or, you know, a human rights activist, but I was targeted as a member of and belonging to this community. 

So that’s how I spent seven years in prison and, I mean, there is a lot to talk about a prison experience. I mean, I think one of the wonderful thing or, you know, positive side of my imprisonment is that I got to meet with too many people inside, hundreds of thousands of women, and I was—as a curious teenager I spoke with too many women there so I was able to learn their socioeconomic status in their countries—and understand the country’s political flaws. 

So that was—I think I took that as a positive side or, you know, that’s why sometimes I describe it as the university of life.  

But coming back to the religious persecution to conclude, not to exceed six minutes—(laughter)—so the Rohingya is an extreme example of how when religious persecutions are not prevented then you will see these—you know, these contributors or perpetrators of this religious persecutions emboldened and going far beyond, you know, discrimination and persecution, and committing—actually committing  atrocity crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity. 

And now we have a bigger task and we continue to get involved in this to fix this situation, to bring justice, to bring equality, to bring peace. Like I mentioned, it’s not just the structure anymore. It’s culture, right?  

So we have to work with the other religious organizations and leaders and stakeholders to bring about the generational change we were discussing in the earlier panel, and at the same time, bring about immediate justice and end violence.  

And so I continued to get involved actively over the past twelve years ever since I was released from jail in 2012 and now that’s become the very reason I had to flee the country.  

VISOTZKY: That’s what I want to ask about, that your work now is probably easier and more effective not being in Burma, and I’m thinking of—you mentioned that your dad had an ally, a partner, Aung San Suu Kyi. I remember sitting in this room when she came to the Council on Foreign Relations and in all of my years as a member of the CFR it’s the only time I’ve ever seen the speaker get a standing ovation.  

So that was great then. But she’s had her ups and downs because of the military and her relationships with them. So would you say that to make any progress in Burma you really can’t be in Burma? Because I think she’s back in jail right now.  

NU: She’s back in jail. I think looking at her, she was my idol when I was young and I remember when I was, like, six, seven years old my father showing her photo, which he hid inside his diary notebook, right. And it was in, like, 1995, around that time. We were not allowed to even listen to the radio or have her photo present.  

So my father would tell me about her story and I grew up, you know, idealizing her and, like, you know, she was a hero—a shero hero. But what we have witnessed in Burma under her leadership was that, you know, at the end of the day sometimes the idealizing or, you know, putting all our hope in one individual could be a mistake, and she failed to uphold her moral integrity and the moral leadership when it came to the persecution against religious minorities, Rohingya and other minorities as well.  

She failed to stand up for what is right and what is just for the communities affected, the most marginalized, and I do not believe in leadership that cannot protect the most marginalized in our society. I think it is absolutely critical for leaders to stand up for what is right. 

Otherwise, I do not believe in that leadership and she failed us, all of us. Not only Rohingya, not only Burmese people, but also entire world, and that is where we see now a setback. You know, her strategy, her compromises over the justice over fundamental issues just was wrong and I think that’s how we see the setback.  

But now I think there’s a notion among society, especially young people, that we need to revisit our culture, our political ideology, our, you know, political systems, all of it. So I think we are involved. My organization is also involved in part of the revisioning movement, I would say. 

We are coming up with a more inclusive leadership in consensus building, decision making, and new approaches. So I’m hopeful. It will take a lot of time and we will need a lot of support from the international community throughout our processes as well as to change the entire system, which is under control of the military.  

VISOTZKY: Thank you. So, next, I want to turn to Mohamed Elsanousi.  

Mohamed, you’re a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and I know that you and Wai Wai last week were at the summit in D.C., right, on international religious freedom.  

Do you want to give us some takeaways from that summit and then particularly talk about what you hope to accomplish in your work on the Commission? 

ELSANOUSI: Thank you. Thank you so much, and thank you to Irina and the team of the CFR for gathering us here. You know, it’s a really critical workshop that’s—every year I look forward to it so I’m glad to meet also a number of friends here.  

And thank you, Brother Burt. Burt and I, we go a long way back in many interfaith and interreligious collaboration, and here I just am delighted to be with you also, Nazila and Wai Wai. 

I have six minutes here. I think the summit I’m going to leave it to the later part of the discussion here. But I just want to begin by really taking from you, Wai Wai, and talking about the persecution in Burma and where, you know, religious or political leaders are not really standing up for those who are persecuted.  

So I want to take you from Burma to a positive, you know, kind of example of the Holy Father Pope Francis. When he visited Central African Republic there was a prosecution in that country, right, you know, and then but he decided to visit, not only to visit and talk to political leaders but he decided to go to the most difficult places, places in Bangui, in the capital.  

He decided to go to PK5. The majority of Muslims’ communities are living in that place. The international communities, the United Nations, France—everybody told him, don’t go. It is dangerous. You’ll be killed.  

But he said, no, faith over fear. And he went there and met with the imam—the chief imam, Imam Ahmad al-Tijani, in the mosque and he said, faith over fear. I come here to stand with you in solidarity and we would like you to practice your religion freely.  

That is statement, a statement, this courage to raise awareness and to stand in solidarity. That’s a positive example. Unfortunately, we have so many assets as religious communities, but our assets and theological documents are underutilized—are not used to advance religious freedom.  

You know, I can go on to talk to you about, you know, William Rogers, you know, in 1600, and yesterday, Melissa Rogers, you know, also mentioned the Baptists and their commitment to religious freedom. This was almost 400 years ago. He saw religious freedom as a prerequisite for prosperity, for poverty eradication, for peace, for security, right?  

And then I can go on and on and talk about many documents. I can talk about Vatican II. I can talk about Marrakesh Declaration. I can talk about many teachings from the Jewish communities as well and other traditions that advance religious freedom.  

But these documents are underutilized the way I see them. We also see that there are a number of movements in recent history that actually realize, whether it is governments or communities, the importance of religious freedom.  

But also we see that, you know, these movements, those structures, are also not fully capacitated actually to advance religious freedom as we believe that religious freedom can do that. We can talk about the—you know, the recent mushroom of ambassadors in the Western world of religious freedom, right? We can talk about the international parliamentarians. We can talk about the Article 18 alliance which has about forty-three countries now. 

But all of that is not really capacitated and used to advance religious freedom so we need to find the best way to do that. 

Now, Brother Burt, you basically, you know, asked me about the Commission and maybe I will take the opportunity to actually give a little bit advertisement to the Commission.  

VISOTZKY: I’m happy for that. But before you do that, you mentioned but didn’t expand on the Marrakesh Declaration. 

ELSANOUSI: Right. Right. 

VISOTZKY: And this was your baby. So can you explain to people what you were after and what you accomplished with the Marrakesh Declaration?  

ELSANOUSI: Well, the Marrakesh Declaration, the way I look into it, the most powerful currently existing document coming from the Islamic faith, Islamic tradition, to advance religious freedom, and the declaration itself now—next year is going to be the tenth year’s anniversary—but the declaration itself is based on 1,400 years tradition of prophet of Islam, Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in the Arabian Peninsula where he called everyone sitting or living in that peninsula as a community. You are free to practice your religion and everybody is equal and everybody is ummah, or a community. 

But that tradition, Burt, is rightly—basically what happened 1,400 years ago. What happened is persecution. What happened is violation of people’s religious freedom, right? We see today, in spite of that beautiful tradition, majority of the violations of religious freedom now when you look into countries of particular concern or designated country all is in the Muslim world, right?  

That’s why Shaykh Abdallah Bin Bayyah and a number of Muslim scholars and the American Muslim communities in particular supported bringing the Marrakesh Declaration, a document that could help to actually advance religious freedom. The document is there but it’s not implemented, and we need to find the best way to implement the documents.  

Now, coming back to my commercial break, right—(laughter)—the Commission—so the United States Commission of International Religious Freedom is a bipartisan independent commission and we are actually commissioners coming from different backgrounds, and I’m really delighted to have, you know, Steve Schneck, the chair of the Commission, actually with us here in this room, and my colleagues from the Commission, Erin and Elizabeth, are here as well with us. 

So the Commission is mandated to advise the president, the secretary of state, and the Congress on matters related to religious freedom, and we do it in the bipartisan manner. We actually issue an annual report. Our report is different than the State Department reports because our report is more analytical, right?  

We look into countries around the world. We assess the state of religious freedom and we recommend designating countries of particular concern and putting countries on the watch list. But here is the catch. We recommend countries. We don’t look into political calculations. We look into conditions.  

We recommend to the State Department to designate India as a country of particular concern, right? But the State Department, because of our bilateral relationship, they don’t do that. They have their own political calculations, right?  

So that—just to give you one example, so our report and our commercial of 2024 is coming up on March 25 in the morning in Washington. That our annual report, when we are going to announce which countries that we are designating or redesignating as countries of particular concerns, right? 

VISOTZKY: Do you want to give us an advance— 

ELSANOUSI: Well, maybe, in the coffee break. (Laughter.)  

Yeah. So that is the report. One of our priorities is also the prisoners of conscience. We advocate for them, the victims of persecutions. We keep a list. The list today has about 2,300. These are public, and I know that there are more than that, but we advocate.  

The good news—again, I like to, you know, basically build on the positive, right? Two weeks ago, our advocacy collaborative, along with governments, with civil society, we celebrated the release of two prisoners of conscience in Egypt.  

We also celebrated the release of a prisoner of conscience in Nigeria, Bala, right. So I think that that we—do that as well. So—and we do it in the bipartisan manner. 

And now the summit. As you know, this summit, and I call it—you call it Earth Summit and I call it is a ministerial through a civil society lens. And why is that? Because the Earth Summit was not an Earth Summit. It was a ministerial to advance religious freedom. 

During the first Trump administration, Ambassador Brownback actually is the one who did it, and he continued to do the ministerial hosted at the State Department, attended by—the first one was eighty ministers from around the world of foreign affairs and educations and all of that and then the second year—and then President Trump actually had his own first summit on religious freedom in the United Nations here in New York, right. 

Then the Biden administration came. They did not do the ministerial at the State Department. So then the Brownback created what is called the Earth Summit. So we were there at the Earth Summit just last week and it’s always connected to the National Prayer Breakfast, and the Earth Summit also is actually expanding and now is bringing more than 1,500 people from around the world to discuss issues of religious freedom.  

There are a number of things happening in the Earth Summit. Of course, there is an improvement needed to happen in terms of, you know, more inclusion, more diversity, more focus on the larger notion of religious freedom or belief or those who don’t believe at all. 

VISOTZKY: Thank you. Thank you.  

And I don’t want to leave you without commenting on your very attractive tie. I had set Mohamed up badly because I insisted that we were not going to wear ties today, and then last night the men on the panel were wearing ties. So I texted Mohamed early this morning. 

ELSANOUSI: Seven o’clock in the morning. 

VISOTZKY: And he said, but I didn’t bring a tie. So I brought him two of my ties but he got a better offer from Irina. (Laughter.) He’s actually wearing the CFR tie.  

ELSANOUSI: Don’t make that announcement. So everybody expect Irina— 

VISOTZKY: Yeah. We all want a tie. (Laughter.) 

So, but now it’s really my pleasure to invite Naz to talk about your work as a rapporteur at the United Nations and does that—how does that interplay with your academic work as well? 

GHANEA: Thank you. It’s a privilege to be here and I want to thank you for holding this annually, but I think we probably all agree that it’s particularly timely and critical that we meet now—here and now. 

I was a bit of a U.N. junkie or groupie, you might say, as a Ph.D. student and went to various world conferences. I studied the records of the contribution of U.N. special rapporteurs who—seeking to advance and to secure freedom of religion or belief in my research, and two and a half years ago I was privileged to be appointed to serve in this law—in this role for six years. 

The special procedures are the special rapporteurs go under the special procedures. They’re as powerful as states allow them to be and resource them to be. So what is—the parallel with my academic work is not only in those twenty-five years of research. It has related often to freedom of religion or belief also as it relates to other human rights but also—so that’s the academic research connection between the mandate and the role but also Oxford pays me and the mandate doesn’t. (Laughter.) So thank you. Shout out to the University of Oxford for essentially subsidizing this work.  

It is a privileged role. The role of the mandate was created in 1986 so it’s thirty-nine years since the mandate was appointed. It was really as a compensation, you might say, to the fact that there wasn’t going to be a U.N. treaty on freedom of religion or belief.  

So for some twenty years there had been an effort to draft. Initially, the General Assembly had instructed the then Commission on Human Rights to draft an instrument on racial and religious hatred. 

After some years of drafting they realized it’s the religious and belief part that is problematic so sped ahead with—thankfully, of course, with a treaty that addresses racial discrimination, the CERD treaty, and then they returned to the religious or belief instruction and in 1981 finally there was this very short 1981 U.N. declaration that was adopted.  

But there wasn’t the consensus, the support, the agreement, for it to then be pursued for how many more years—twenty years—for a short declaration. So how many decades would it have been? 

But, you know, the environment had changed and consensus had, unfortunately, diminished. So five years later then at least there was going to be a mandate and it’s one of the first thematic mandates—one of the very early mandates that have survived for that four decades. 

The mandates can pursue country visits, have—issue communications, intervene, essentially, on behalf of victims with the government’s concerns and also issue thematic reports.  

But I will talk a little bit more about each of those. But underscoring all of that is the opportunity to learn and to engage throughout the year with all kinds of actors, and whilst you, Burt, very rightly have drawn attention to local, national but with an international focus, to be fair, and international, but freedom of religion or belief would be meaningless if it wasn’t for it being something that is realized on the ground for people.  

You know, it’s not about being on the international circuit, engaging at the international level—representing, reminding, cajoling at the international level but, ultimately, we want and, you know, we were told by Azza’s panel earlier talk about the positives. You know, sometimes you just write to an ambassador and the pregnant lady who has been put in prison purely because of her religion quietly gets released.  

You get, you know, reduction of prison sentences. You get the rabbi who’s in prison have access to, you know, counsel, chaplaincy, and kosher food provided to him. Because sometimes it is not by instruction that those restrictions on freedom of religion or belief are occurring but an oversight or a prejudice, perhaps, just at that prison level.  

Perhaps it is occurring and it can be corrected just by a reminder to the ambassador concerned. You know, you get a quick response. Often you get no response, even when it’s a formal allegation letter. 

The country visits, of course, have existed over the last thirty-nine years. Around one-third of the countries of the world have been visited. But a lot of—you can see the list of requests. A lot of the countries that I want to visit in order to balance geographic, religious majority, egregious violations, you request—they even have issued standing invitations, which should suggest that you can go at any time. It’s just a matter of sequencing and facilitating. You get no response. 

But, you know, you have to put it on record that you requested to visit those countries, sometimes countries that, you know, also there might have been challenges, and every country has challenges around freedom of religion or belief in one form or another. But, you know, Indonesia, there are also positive stories and experiences to be shared there but the invitation never comes. Egypt, Nigeria—I could go on. But I know that the next country visit will be to Zambia.  

So those are the country visits. So one-third over forty years not great but that’s because you can only visit two countries per year or where there are limitations. A liquidity crisis in the U.N. last year, which definitely will not look better, sadly, this year. That was reduced to one country.  

So it’s going to be very slow to even be able to visit a hundred and ninety three even if those countries were allowing that visit. But those allow for a deep dive, a report that will be presented at the United Nations translated to the six languages and the opportunity for a deeper engagement on the freedom of religion or belief landscape challenges, opportunities. 

For allegation letters it can be any restriction or violations of human rights. It can be egregious mass violations or it can be the denial of kosher food, chaplaincy, school education. There isn’t an opt out, et cetera, et cetera. It can be from daily life or suffocating and excruciating violations.  

But the consent of the victims is required for the mandate to be able to pursue that and when that can—their names can be kept quiet but the consent is required, right. So that’s a restriction and it takes time.  

So, you know, if somebody is in prison now we have to draft it. We have to ensure consent. We have to delineate all the rights that would have been violated should it be confirmed and we call it an allegation because we don’t do fact finding. We are assured about the source but we’re not—I’m not flying in to check what’s happening in that prison.  

So then you write it up. Then you send it to the government concerned through their ambassador in Geneva. For sixty days it’s confidential. So for the prisoner right now—and I agree with Wai Wai that always, unfortunately, we see that religion or belief minorities suffering a disproportionate burden.  

That doesn’t mean the majority are not also suffering economic restrictions or political restrictions. But you see that there’s compounded and, you know, extra layer of suffering for religion or belief minorities.  

So it takes time to get that out but there are these successes. There can also be press releases that echo that. Some of the recent allegation letters that have now been made public—that’s over the last quarter—includes those for the Libyan National Army regarding their targeting of Sufi leaders and shrines and believers.  

China—a broader allegation letter but also delineating the impact on religion or belief minorities in China. Egypt, on the asylum law which restricts manifestation of religion or belief for refugees—asylum seekers in Egypt to those that are Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. There’s a broader backdrop there of restriction of even identity cards to people who are Jewish, Muslim, or—but this one was focused on the asylum law. 

India—the threats to Sikh activists around the world and also the killing of Mr. Hardeep Singh Nijjar. So we’re talking extraterritorial now violations beyond India itself, and France regarding the administrative restriction around people with religious dress and participation in sports so particularly Muslim women.  

So, you know, you see that the number of people concerned, the backdrop to the issue and its religion or belief dimensions, these are multiple. But this is just one sample and there are more than a thousand allegation letters and you can—over the forty years. If there was resource behind it should it be more? Absolutely. Absolutely. It should be tens of thousands. But that’s the nature of an unpaid part time role that actually is. 

ELSANOUSI: Naz, I want to ask you— 

GHANEA: May I add one thing? 

VISOTZKY: Yeah. Sure. 

GHANEA: That also there are thematic reports to the U.N. presented at every General Assembly and Human Rights Council so twice a year, and one of them was about the local level and freedom of religion or belief.  

So, you know, whilst it’s an international mandate we should look upwards from the victim and victims on the ground and see everybody has a role to play including our friends and neighbors and family, but also the prison official, the municipality, the federal level, et cetera. 

VISOTZKY: So you’ve cued me to the local level. Your family is originally from Iran but you were not born there. Is the fact that your family Baháʼí related to that? 

GHANEA: So actually I was—because I was two months premature and because of too much detail for here but I was born in Iran but my parents had already moved to Qatar. My father was denied his medical certificate to practice medicine because he was a Baháʼí and this is during the period of the Shah—the Shah’s rule.  

So, you know, we were talking about the roots of prejudice. The roots of prejudice can, of course, be inflamed and they were and the violations against Baháʼís, of course, became much more egregious, unfortunately, and systematized and institutionalized law after law after law that excludes Baháʼís—purposefully excludes. 

Also, you know, look at 499, 500 lists of the criminal court code particularly targets Christian converts and Baháʼís. So, you know, it’s not accidental. It’s a project of the government that with all the changes in Iran over forty-six years—and I think we’re marking the anniversary yesterday or today of forty-six years of the revolution—that you see that policy, law, and targeting is just so sharp.  

I think as a Baháʼí I’m totally committed to freedom of religion or belief. So it’s, you know, the theological commitment and the legal commitments coming together because, as you say, Commissioner Elsanousi, you know, one sheds tears of joy when Mubarak Bala is released just as much as a person of any other religion or belief is released.  

The commitment has to be universal and inclusive. Otherwise, it doesn’t deserve the word human rights or liberty. I think we have to be absolutely clear on that. I’m very—I concede a lot in terms of wherever we are at if we’re taking steps forward that’s good and needs to be welcomed, whilst keeping an eye on the legal standards these commitments that were developed and established over seventy-six years and in human history and literature and culture, of course, thousands of years, but at least in their present capture.  

But if you are going to be exclusionary about it you can’t call it human rights. Call it whatever you want but it’s not liberty and it’s not human rights.  

VISOTZKY: So I want to take one moment for a very quick final round, a lightning round, and that is a very simple question.  

For those of you in the room that haven’t noticed there’s a new government in place in the United States, and if I can take a phrase from President Obama, who used to talk about the fierce urgency of now, I want to know about the fierce urgency of the next four years.  

If people in this room who are religious leaders need a laser focus what should we be focused on to preserve religious freedom? We’ll start with Wai Wai. 

NU: Oh, I am not a U.S. citizen, so I don’t think I have a right to comment. It would be an injustice to comment on the U.S.—United States political matter. 

But I would say—(laughter)— 

GHANEA: Nevertheless. 

NU: I mean, based on our experience, and the special rapporteur Nazila has explained it pretty well, I guess I’ll put it this way. In our experience, violation of religious freedom is injustice itself and it starts from bit by bit, step by step, from the baby steps to the bigger steps.  

When religious freedom is violated in one place or as a small step there’s always the potential for it to go farther and there’s always the potential to affect religious freedom of others in your society.  

Let’s say if the Muslim community is targeted or Christian community is targeted. It will come to the Hindu community, Jewish community, and others. You know, vis-à-vis it’s, you know, small religious freedom violations against will always go to bigger violations especially if it involves the state or governance structure laws, institution, structure laws.  

And that is—that is where you can use—we can say it’s a red flag already and it’s a really important step to be able to stop. If we’re not able to stop involvement of institutionalizations of religious freedom violations, I think we are in a very dangerous society.  

And, again, you know, if I borrow Dr. MLK’s words, you know, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. The same goes for religious freedom violations in one place. It’s a threat to religious freedom violations everywhere.  

I mean, it’s—I’m not saying about United States. It’s true to entire world and United States for us has been, you know, a country where we look up for the values, principles of democracy and freedom, and religious freedom in particular, and the discussions, the nuances, the news, all of it, I think, frustrate not just me—I think many people in this country as well as around the world.  

VISOTZKY: Thank you. 

Mohamed? 

ELSANOUSI: Well, thank you, Burt. 

Here is the urgency of now. Burt, if you remember we kind of had a similar situation during the Obama administration, right? It’s a different context, of course, but it’s all about the way we framed that situation then was also religious freedom.  

That is the time when Pastor Terry Jones burned the Quran, right? When there was controversy surrounding building Islamic centers or a mosque in the country. But the way we framed the issue at that time this is an American issue. It’s not a Muslim issue alone.  

That’s why we did the emergency summit in Washington, which gave birth to Shoulder-to-Shoulder, right? You were part of that. 

Now, Shoulder-to-Shoulder is standing with American Muslims upholding American ideals. It became a movement, right? More than forty denominations are actually running this campaign. 

Now, the urgency this administration and the Trump administration had in the first term and the second term, they were actually saying that they are for religious freedom, right? They are advancing religious freedom. They did the ministerial. Trump did the first ever, you know, summit at the U.N. on religious freedom, right. 

Now, but what is the urgency of now? It’s, again, we need the moral voices. We have to say yes for religious freedom as a prerequisite for justice, for prosperity, for everything, but it has to be religious freedom for everyone everywhere equally, right?  

That’s what you want to say now. It’s not for a particular group but religious freedom for everyone and we need the moral voices now. Again, I mentioned earlier Pope Francis. He also spoke the day before yesterday in his letter, and I’m quoting—in his letter to the Conference of the Catholic Bishops addressing the issue which is we’re facing now about the dignity.  

Pope Francis said that, you know, the deporting people who often come from difficult situations violate the dignity of many men and women and of entire families, right. He spoke again, right.  

So we need to have moral voice to talk about the urgency of now that, yes, for religious freedom—let’s look into religious freedom for everyone. Let’s use these to actually support everyone, not for any particular group.  

ELSANOUSI: Thank you.  

And, Naz, you get the final word here.  

GHANEA: Thank you.  

I think we need to reduce fear. I arrived in Newark last night and the immigration officer, he said, what are you here for. I said, for a religious freedom summit. And he said, oh, that’s really urgent because the Christians are being persecuted in this country. (Laughter.)  

And, of course, Christians have equal rights and their rights should absolutely be upheld, and maybe we’ve been blinkered and there’s things that need to be surfaced and dealt with. But I felt a fear in that, and I think the previous panel really spoke to a quotation that I love that fear cannot—love cannot exist in a heart possessed by fear, right?  

We cannot have love and understanding and solidarity and inclusivity if there is fear, and I fear fearmongering, and it’s for civil society actors on the ground, religious and belief leaders on the ground, that can stem that fear and be more sober and calm about it.  

So I think countering that fear and that narrative, not approaching freedom of religion or belief as a pre-ranked list. Yes, absolutely inclusive. Yes, learn from the past and reflect but not—I was in Hungary on a country visit back in October and I said it’s, you know, Hungary helps program, focuses on Christian persecution in other countries, builds churches in Syria, Iraq. Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not, and it’s a very positive thing. 

However, there’s talk about Christian persecution and I asked whether there’s any way that those that are persecuted because of their religion or belief, either because of Christianity or another, have the—can seek refuge in Hungary, because I didn’t see that it was possible.  

So let’s join it up. If we care about freedom of religion or belief we also need to provide refuge. It should not be the only response to persecution. We should not get everybody exiled because they’re being targeted because of their religion or belief but, surely, that safety net needs to be there.  

VISOTZKY: Thank you.  

So we all have our charge, and I want to remind everyone in this room that you are the moral voices we’re talking about. This is incumbent upon you. So— 

GHANEA: Us as well, or only—(laughter.) 

VISOTZKY: Yes, you as well. 

But, you know, so Ani, are there any questions? 

OK. Ani’s hand was up before anyone, so please.  

Q: Thank you. Good morning.  

VISOTZKY: Introduce yourself.  

Q: Yes. Ani Zonneveld from Muslims for Progressive Values. Nice to see you all—Nazila, Mohamed, and Wai Wai. Fantastic talk. 

My question is to Nazila and Mohamed. Now that especially both of you are independent of the U.S. government and with—at the breakfast prayer conference when Trump announced that we are going to protect and advance Christians who are being prosecuted here in the United States, how are the two of you going to address this issue? 

GHANEA: All or one at a time? (Laughs.) 

VISOTZKY: No. No. One at a time. 

ELSANOUSI: You know—Ani, thank you.  

So I was in the room when the president spoke in the National Prayer Breakfast and he not only announced the anti-Christian bias task force, he also announced a presidential commission on religious liberty, right. These are the two things that he mentioned.  

We are yet to figure out what that means, just to be honest with you. What is the presidential commission on religious liberty? What is that? Is it domestic? Is it international?  

How it’s going to work with this existing, you know, commission, which is actually—it’s a(n) act by the Congress which established the commission and established the Office of the International Religious Freedom ambassador, the act of 1998 of the Congress, right?  

So we’re still trying to know what is it. If this presidential commission is going to work with this? Is it domestic? So we’re still trying to figure that out.  

But I think, you know, if we get the opportunity to have the discussion with the administration as the nature of this commission as a bipartisan we will definitely—we’re going to speak about the way that the commission was established and the way that—what mandate the commission actually has because we are not, you know, established to protect a religious freedom for one group.  

We are bipartisan. We are looking for religious freedom for everyone, religious freedom or belief or no belief at all, for everyone that they can practice. I think that’s going to be our position. But I have no information how this task force of anti-religious bias is going to function.  

VISOTZKY: Naz, do you want to comment as well?  

GHANEA: Ani, I think we’ll have to be watching this space. But just let me step back from this and say that I’m independent of the U.S. but also all governments. It’s an independent appointment. 

Since 1998 there have been political officers based at embassies, U.S. embassies around the world. Some of the data they shared especially early on gave us the first glimpse, the first kind of, like, official documentation on what does the landscape of religious and belief diversity look like in that country, and that’s been an annual task.  

The training that is provided for embassies around the world for freedom of religion or belief for that is the most thorough training in the world of many trainings around religious literacy, freedom of religious or belief literacy.  

So how it plays out in this country is very important but it will also have—I’m also curious about what it means internationally. In the most recent round of universal periodic review in the United Nations the U.S. made no comment. It has withdrawn from the U.N. Human Rights Council, we understand. 

I hope there won’t be a withdrawal from international human rights treaties because I think it will encourage all states to be selective and it can choose. You know, are we going to now have a momentum of withdrawal of international human rights treaties that protect U.S. citizens as much as anybody else around the world?  

So I have a broader concern, and I’m also curious how this will play out and, yes, a bit worried about it, to put it mildly. 

VISOTZKY: All right. Next question, please. 

Q: Good morning. Hyepin Im with Faith and Community Empowerment. I also served on the Homeland Security’s Faith-Based Security Advisory Council as well.  

So one question is related to the study as a rapporteur. What is the outcome of that report in the aftermath and also what kind of cooperation did you get and what cooperation did you need but that you didn’t get as well? 

And just another question is you spoke about the leader who, in essence, kind of lost their moral grounds. So what are some steps that you’re taking to ensure for all of us as well how do you stay consistent in that pursuit?  

Thank you.  

VISOTZKY: So was that particularly to Naz?  

ELSANOUSI: To Naz and Wai Wai. 

VISOTZKY: OK. Go for it. 

GHANEA: The report that will be presented next month at the Human Rights Council is on the prohibition of torture in human and degrading treatment and freedom of religion or belief. You know, a lot of the task of the mandate is to connect.  

Its resources are very limited but we have multiple human rights mechanisms and, you know, entities around the world including at the regional level, et cetera, and I try to connect because then you assure that the freedom of religion or belief mandate of everybody at different levels can be encouraged and activated. 

So in producing that report I benefited greatly from the input of the special rapporteur on torture, the committee against torture at the United Nations, and the subcommittee for the prevention of torture. Why is that important? And, of course, many international NGOs—local NGOs and experts.  

So you try to make it inclusive in the process of drafting and engaging in the process of drafting because then, even before the report is out, everybody has started to think more—in a more pronounced way that many people, sadly, are targeted for torture and human degrading treatment but so are people on grounds of their religion or belief, right?  

So that’s one of the outcomes is the process itself, the engagement. There needs to be—I find time and again, and I’m sure other actors, all of you, find this as well—you need to remind people what is freedom of religion or belief, that it is for all, that it is inclusive, that it is not— 

VISOTZKY: Exactly. 

GHANEA: —incongruent with other human rights and that it is of benefit to society.  

It’s not—the previous one was on peace and freedom of religion or belief. The existence of religion and belief diversity is not a precursor to conflict and division. In fact, it can be the opposite, depending on how you manage it politically.  

So the outcome at its very basic is presentation and you hope for engagement with the states in the room and the civil society in the room but also all the possibilities of interacting, benefitting, and trying to see this realized on the ground subsequently.  

VISOTZKY: Thank you. Next question.  

Q: Abdul Malik Mujahid. I’m an imam in Chicago and I chair a Burma task force in support of Rohingya Muslims.  

Just about six weeks ago I was in Rohingya camps in Bangladesh and I—first time I encounter a conversation among Rohingyas about a topic skepticism towards international processes—International Criminal Court, International Court of Justice—and they were wondering the Kachin people, who are all Christians mostly, they resorted to armed resistance.  

They are persecuted but there is no genocide of those people, and Rohingyas I found multiple groups wondering the path which we chose of peaceful resistance hurt us more, and the only time we have been able to go back to Burma when there was a threat by Bangladesh that unless you take your citizens back we’ll arm them.  

So I see a conversation which is going to lead for another element in Burma of Rohingya Muslims finally deciding to take arms. Have you heard this conversation and how it helps all the effort which you are putting together?  

VISOTZKY: Wai? 

NU: This is a really challenging question.  

So we have a military coup in 2021 February and the people of Burma, especially young people, started nonviolence demonstration—peaceful resistance movement. But the military attacked them violently. So the young people of Burma decided to take arms, right? 

Now we also have, this decade-long civil war where ethnic arms organizations like you mentioned—the ethnic arms group like you mentioned, the Kachin or other ethnic groups holding arms for decades for their freedom. 

Now, so basically the resistance movement, whether by the young people from the Burman majority or the ethnic groups, has become a more widely accepted scenario or, you know, the movement itself, and now the demography on the ground are changing. Ethnic arms organizations and these PDF we call people defend forces—smaller young-people-led units—are gaining control, territorial control, winning the military junta’s soldiers.  

So there is a tendency to support this. But in this movement of, let’s say, for especially ethnic—organized ethnic groups over the past seven or eight decades, Rohingya choose to mainly mostly resist peacefully through the political movement, through the advocacy. 

We did have resistance for a couple of years after independence, and then they were the first one to have peace agreement with the Burmese military at that time—Burmese government at that time. Then we had—we did have a few years of resistance in the early 1990s—and it was dissolved. 

But most of the time our leaderships choose to fight for our freedom through the peaceful means and there—over the past ten years when the prosecutions became severe and when the Burmese military started attacking with a genocidal intent and violence attacks where over 1 million people had to flee there was growing notions or discussions among the international communities and Rohingya group whether the Rohingya people should take arms or not.  

There is always a fear of backlash, like, for example, because Rohingya Muslims when you take arms you will be easily branded as terrorists. So there is also a fear and I think there is all of this debate ongoing and those are some of the things that these discussions, particularly, is one of the key factors that step the Rohingya back, right?  

And I think now the situations on the ground, like, specifically in Rakhine state where most—a majority Rohingya were residing or still residing is also changing and we’re losing hope because of the prolonged coup and violence. 

And I think there’s, again, these notions of, like, whether this is the right time for the Rohingya to takes arms or not. And I think, you know, we think about this. Everyone—I think in this room everybody would agree everyone has right to self-defense for their freedom and for their rights, especially when you are actively persecuted, and there is a just war theory on so and so.  

So I think there is growing discussions and notion, and I hope that this will not—because of our faith we will not be—you know, we will not face targeting. I mean, I am a nonviolence peaceful activist, actress, and I choose to do that but there may be other young people who would go different paths, and I think Rohingya should have, or Kachin or Chin, or anybody, any groups—everyone should have same rights and same right to self-defense as well. 

And just, shortly, to answer the previous question, and I think when it comes to moral relationships, especially at this time when we see the rise of xenophobia and all the hate, polarization, and democratic backsliding, moral leadership is very critical and it’s needed more than ever—and I think we need to foster moral leadership not only among the states and government but also among the civil society actors, religious leaders, and among the grassroots level. 

When we speak about religious freedoms or other rights I think every individuals need to be assessing their own words and actions whether we are promoting exclusions or inclusion, right? And I see this kind of gathering, IRF Summit and many of these initiatives among the, you know, like-minded leaders, concerned leaders, moral leaders.  

But I think those actions could be improved, even more proactive approach to inclusivity and discussing the taboo topics or protecting the most marginalized around us regardless of our faith.  

VISOTZKY: Thank you. Thank you. 

Sir? Wait for the microphone.  

Q: Hello, everybody. Egon Cholakian. I am a simple retiree.  

I reside in Kyiv and Washington, D.C. My constituency is the Russian Orthodox Church. I have my disputes with the church and that subsequently takes me into the Balkans and beyond that into Western Europe.  

I had to—I was taken on by a large client constituency well into the hundreds of thousands in Eastern Europe. Asked to take on their plight. They were persecuted by the church, and there’s death involved and so forth.  

I, earlier on in my career, had been posted in Tehran during the revolution so I lived over there, and Mr. Zelensky gave me a call one day and said, would you come out of retirement, sir, because I know the players.  

Why do I raise this? I had to figure out a way to communicate with the church and with Mr. Putin and so forth, and I could not turn to governments. Not the way to go. I elected to use social media—extortion, we call it—and I found that I had no way of ascertaining am I successful, am I delivering my message, or otherwise. 

Out of the blue a mechanism called (vehicle ?), literally Google contacted me and said, you are getting so many hits in Russia, Ukraine, all over. 

VISOTZKY: Wow. 

Q: And they gave me the metrics to the extent that they said you’re number-one in Russia right now. So if I might compare it to our current White House, basically I’m usurping Mr. Putin in popularity.  

Now, the reason I bring this up, a question for you. Nobody has discussed your arsenal. How are you communicating your message? We’re only talking about the message. That’s the warhead. Where’s the fuselage? Where’s the motor?  

Nobody’s mentioned that at all and that is the most critical part. Targeting, getting that weapon—getting that warhead over there to your target.  

VISOTZKY: So can I particularly ask each of you to what extent do you use social media to communicate to the broader world? Why don’t we start with the one most likely to use social media? (Laughter.) 

NU: Oh, my God. I mean, that’s true. 

So we—I think social media is incredibly important at this age. We cannot avoid it, whether we like it or not, and it comes with both positive and negative consequences, and if we are equipped and equipped—if we are resourced then we can use it for good.  

And in my case we have actually run campaign to promote tolerance, nondiscrimination, and religious freedoms in Burma by using social media, right—Facebook, for example—and also in my activism work I communicate with my audience. For example, like, let’s say you just have to know what is this platform and what purpose it serve.  

For example, on Facebook it’s mostly local Burmese, right, or Rohingya. So I would use more messaging, messaging towards those communities and on, let’s say, X or Twitter, right, it’s more, like, international audience, policy makers, et cetera.  

So you just need to know how to communicate with them. I use every—all the platforms available and now I started to use—there’s a lot of controversy over the X, right, so now we started to use Bluesky, right?  

VISOTZKY: Bluesky.  

NU: Bluesky. And we also use LinkedIn for professional audience and so on. So I think social media is an incredibly important tool and we need to use it, and I think it’s very powerful if we’re able to use it in the right way.  

And we also see a lot of other people, you know, are using on the other side to promote their agenda and often they get more support because they often come with their—with resources and more, you know, strategic approach than many of us.  

So I think the key is to know how to use it, having enough resources and equipped with enough understanding, knowledge, and resources and use it strategically.  

VISOTZKY: So, Wai Wai, you seem to use the whole array. 

NU: Yeah. 

VISOTZKY: Mohamed, either for the network or for your commission you or someone you task to do social media? 

ELSANOUSI: Of course. I mean, in the Commission we have the whole communications, you know, department is doing that, using all sort of social media.  

But I think—let me bring in this context of religious freedom and how we could even use social media. Unfortunately, a huge segment of the society is not involved in this, really, sphere, and that is the youth.  

We all know that youth are the one that actually use social media better than everyone else now championing religious freedom. So I think for us to even capitalize more on social media to advance religious freedom we really need to bring young people to the movement and actually we are not doing that, you know, very well. So we need to work on that.  

Social media is very effective. We have experience in the network that I’m leading. We got a grant from the EU to address issues of discrimination in Southeast Asia, particularly in three countries—Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh—and they asked us—the grant was saying that we need to reach to 35 million people in that region to address issues of hate and discriminations to counter those messages.  

And we started—we decided to actually subcontract and work with young people in all of these countries—young people, young organizations. So we actually doubled the number of people we reached to 72 million—(inaudible). 

VISOTZKY: Wow. 

ELSANOUSI: So it’s a very powerful tool, but we need to have the right people to carry that tool. As always, I say religious freedom, interreligious institutions, and structures are aging. We need to find the best way to bring young people to actually lead this movement. 

VISOTZKY: Thank you. 

And, Naz, you get the last word. 

GHANEA: I use X. I use LinkedIn. I probably don’t use it enough because I want to bring another aspect to this is that I don’t find the confrontational approach the most beneficial here and so how—please advise me in the breaks how to better use social media, and let’s not forget the responsibility of social media who are just throwing away their responsibilities every week these days and how important they were encountering hate speech properly defined.  

OK. So let’s not forget that contingent. But how can we promote freedom of religion or belief, get the new generation on board in a conversation that sometimes is more beneficial when it’s desensationalized, depolarized, sober and balanced, and that doesn’t necessarily make itself as the most appealing conversation.  

So I look forward to hearing from you in the break.  

VISOTZKY: So the word here seems to be social media, yes. Anti-social media, no. 

I want to thank our panelists on a twofold thing, not only for appearing on today’s panel and enlightening us but, as we all know, their daily work, the grind in and out, really, indefatigably and we are grateful to you for all that you do for religious freedom.  

Thank you.  

ELSANOUSI: Thank you so much. (Applause.) 

(END) 

This is an uncorrected transcript. 

SINGH: Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Great to be with you. This session is “Global Hot Spots,” which there are many—(laughs)—as we know. And we have the opportunity to hear from some of CFR’s experts to share with us some of their expertise on the regions that they work on. And so I’m really grateful for this opportunity that we have as a community to hear from these leaders. 

I’ll just introduce them briefly, I’ll introduce myself as well, and then we’ll move into the conversation. My name is Simran Jeet Singh. I’m an assistant professor of interreligious histories at Union Theological Seminary. I was previously at the Aspen Institute, and I’m still there as a senior advisor in the Religion and Society program. So thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. 

Ebenezer Obadare is the Douglas Dillon senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Obadare is also a senior fellow at the New York University School of Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs, as well as a fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute of Theology. 

Shannon K. O’Neil is senior vice president, director of Studies, and the Maurice R. Greenberg chair at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she oversees the work of more than six dozen fellows in the David Rockefeller Studies Program as well as CFR’s fourteen fellowship programs. She’s a leading authority on global trade, supply chains, Mexico, and Latin America. 

And Farah Pandith, who many of you know, she is joining us via Zoom. She’s a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy strategist, and a former diplomat. Ms. Pandith is a pioneer in the field of countering violent extremism—CVE—and has been a political appointee in the George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama administrations. 

So a small hand for our panel for joining us today. (Applause.) 

Ebenezer, I’d love to begin with you. 

OBADARE: OK. 

SINGH: What are—what are you seeing in the region of the world where you specialize? How would you characterize the interplay of religion and politics generally? And are there any specific examples or concerns that you would want to call to our attention? 

OBADARE: Thank you, my friend. Good to be here. Thanks for coming. 

That’s a great question. I think the first thing you want to put on the record is that, as we’ve always known, religion continues to play a role in politics in Africa—not just in politics, period, but in the way in which people organize their everyday lives. Religion continues to be interlaid with trade, with, you know, social relations, and is the frame through which most people, you know, see the world. 

Now, in terms of what’s going on on the continent, you can talk in terms of two broad movements. And I’m sure most of the people in this room are familiar with those two movements. 

The first one, what you might call the positive movement—there’s a footnote to that which I can go into later on—is the Pentecostal movement, the Christian religious movement that is easily one of the most vital, one of the most resourceful, one of the most lively Christian denominations in the world, period. So you’re thinking Nigeria. You’re thinking Zambia. You’re thinking Ghana, South Africa, Zimbabwe. These are the hot spots, if you will, for the Pentecostal movement in Africa. 

And then on the not-so-positive side—again, there’s a footnote to that which I can—which I can elaborate—is the Islamist fundamentalist movement. It’s got the attention, rightly, across the Sahel. You’re talking Nigeria. You’re talking Mali. You’re talking Niger. You’re talking Burkina Faso. 

So you’re talking about two movement(s) that seem to have nothing to do with each other. One is about community. The other one is about fracture and fragmentation. But the more closely you look, the more you also realize that there’s a sense in which there is a convergence at the root in terms of the two movements being a reaction to states’ incapacity. Now, states’ incapacity is not the only thing. But if you want to make sense of it, there’s a sense in which you can trace the roots of both movements to state capacity. In the sense that post-structural adjustment in the mid-’90s, early 1990s in all of Africa, with the states not being able to deliver on basic social services, people started looking for alternatives, one alternative was the Pentecostal movement in terms of people looking for community. The other alternative, the not-so-good one, was people taking to fundamentalism also as an escape, you know, also as a means of finding an escape, you know, where the state has been lacking. 

So those are the two broad movements coming out of Africa right now. I’m willing to maybe provide more elaboration later. 

SINGH: That’s great. Thank you. Thank you, Ebenezer. 

Shannon, we know that religion is a force throughout the world, but it doesn’t always look the same in every place. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re seeing in Mexico, Latin America, where you’re working? 

O’NEIL: Sure. Well, welcome. It’s great to have all of you here at CFR. 

And yet, you know, what’s interesting—and I think in contrast to Ebenezer’s, you know, depiction of Africa and the countries in Africa—you know, religion in politics is sort of the dog that’s not barking in Latin America. We have seen, you know, over—in recent years many of the trends you see around the world of polarization, of fragmentation, of changing political parties and leanings and the like, but as you look at the schisms that you see and sort of how people bring people to the, you know, ballot boxes and the like religion hasn’t been a particularly motivating factor. And you know, I’ve looked back at—and obviously, there’s lots of countries and there’s differences between countries. But you know, I look back at sort of the independence movements, the—sort of the Mexican revolution, the sort of democratization movements in Latin America in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and then later on in the ’70s, ’80s, you know, as they came—they went through authoritarian times and back into democracy, and there, you know, there was a concerted effort in many of the places to separate church and state. And I think that legacy of having those be quite different has carried over even as the kind of faiths that people in Latin America, you know, move to or believe in or participate in, they have changed, right? It was a very Catholic region. It has become less Catholic and lots of other kind of faiths coming in. But it hasn’t really infiltrated politics, at least in a kind of participatory factor, right? 

So as I look at the divides we see in the elections that happen, lots of it is quite secular. It’s often still, as it has been for decades, class-based, sort of differences in class. In some countries, you see it around ethnicity, indigenous movements and the like that have, you know, blocs that come and are important for various factions. But it’s really brought around issues of the day. It’s brought around issues of corruptions, issues of violence, issues of lack of economic opportunity and prosperity. Those are the kinds of things. And then sometimes charismatic people, but not as often charismatic people in a sort of religious sense, that that is what makes them charismatic. Instead, it’s other kinds of things that—you know, that they stand out and become, you know, like López Obrador in Mexico, right? Not religious. Milei in Argentina, not particularly religious, right? There’s other things that motivate them. 

The last thing I will say, though, is not that religion doesn’t matter in politics, and there are politicians—while they may not identify and lead with that, they benefit from some of the galvanizing and coalition building that sometimes religion brings. And I would say probably the most important example there is in Brazil. And you know, the Brazilians, whether fondly or not, refer to a particularly strong caucus in the—in the Congress called—they call it the Bullets and Bible Caucus. And this is a caucus that supported Jair Bolsonaro, who is the former president before the current president, Lula; comes from sort of the rightist side; identifies with sort of agrarian interests and the like, and those were the states where he performed quite well. And that is a pretty, you know, religious-based, conversative movement that has lots of votes in Congress. So it’s not that it’s not there, but interestingly—and I think compared to sort of what Ebenezer was saying—it hasn’t been the way, you know, presidential candidates or members of congress or others who are trying to gain office, it’s not what they lead in to appeal to voters. 

SINGH: Farah, it’s good to see you. Sad that you’re not with us in person, but good to see you. I’d love to bring you into the conversation, and perhaps you could react to what you’re hearing from your colleagues or provide us other insights broadly from your work around the globe, maybe in the Middle East, with regard to the interplay of religion and politics. 

PANDITH: Nothing’s happening in the Middle East, Simran. I don’t know what you’re talking about. (Laughter.) 

It’s really—it’s really great to see you, and I’m so sorry that I can’t be with you. Hello from snowy Washington. 

Let me—let me actually respond to some of what I’ve heard and take us back at a 50,000-foot level because, for me as I think about the movements around religion and politics, it isn’t necessarily state-oriented, OK? I’m seeing changes that are—we all are seeing; I’m not, you know—we all have seen how issues of identity and belonging are changing the way people feel about themselves and how they see themselves in the world. And that’s sort of the platform from which I see things both in the online space and in the offline space. And that is a catalyzing factor to the way in which religion is brought in, because as you think about identity and you think about why younger generations are motivated to do something, something really big is taking place right now. 

And I think for me, as I think about the moment that we’re in, this is really important. It isn’t—it isn’t containable, the way we have thought about things before. There are so many facets to this that are moving very fast among three generations in particular—Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha—that we do not yet know the implications of this on politics, and in the voter box, and in how they feel about their nation, their leaders, and who they are in those countries. 

And I want to bring America into that as well, because when we think about foreign policy, CFR, we’re looking outside of the U.S., right, mostly. That’s what we’re looking at. But interestingly, as I think more and more about the movements that are happening specifically in the post-October 7 environment, this issue of who I am is manifesting in America in a very different way, and it’s actually adding fuel to conversations that are happening in other parts of the world and actually motivating action in our own country. 

So all of these forces are moving along to make it actually a very different and untested stabilization point for us as we are policymakers, or thinkers, or activists, or civil society, certainly in the audience. What do we make of all these forces that are moving us around? 

Well, certainly some political leaders are using that motivation of religion to take onboard this idea of identity and belonging. Countries as diverse as the United States and India, for example, have used religion to motivate the masses to do a particular thing. 

But for me, I also want to say that the missing piece in all of this is the predictive modeling of how this is going to play out. And I’m actually quite concerned that we aren’t seeing the kind of focus and attention on how this plays out because we don’t have three things. 

First, we have—we all understand the role of technology and AI, and how that’s going to change markets and how it’s going to change business. We’re not talking about it’s going to change culture and how people feel. And that matters. It matters to religion. It matters to all the things I’ve just said. 

Secondly, we haven’t spent any time as policymakers—certainly, I can a hundred percent say this for the United States; I don’t know for other countries—but cultural intelligence has not been part of the system by which we analyze. And so what do I mean by that? The trends that are happening, the nuances that are happening in Gen Z or Millennials, for example, that can nudge particular people in a different direction, so that therefore you’re not as wildly surprised when things happen—an eruption on the campus, for example, or an interest in something else that’s happening because of a foreign policy thing. Problematic. 

And then the third is gender, and I think that is completely missed in the way in which we’re thinking about the world and the forces of religion. And I want here to speak specifically about Islam. I think that as we look at one-fourth of the planet that is Muslim, understanding that most of them are under the age of thirty, understanding that they are all digital natives, understanding that—Ebenezer was talking about the fact that things are happening in Africa, obviously, with Islamists that are moving forward. But there’s something more specific here, and that is the weaponization of religion to radicalize. And I as think about the potential to get the combination between identity, what’s happening online, and what it means to be of particular faith, we have analyzed things from a male point of view and we have not seen the perspective of how that could actually influence women, which are—which is, to me, lessons that we should have learned from other extremist groups that have mobilized females—ISIS comes to mind—to move people in a particular way. 

So all of these forces are churning. And so as you talk about religion and politics, I see all of this in a way that is startling and scary on one level, but an opportunity to adjust what we’re doing on the other. 

SINGH: Thank you. Thank you, Farah. 

I’m tempted to go down a rabbit hole and ask twenty questions based on what you just said, but I’ll try and stay disciplined. And, Shannon, maybe I’ll bring it back over to you here. Let’s attend specifically to foreign policy as it pertains to the Trump administration. What do you see as active hinges, positive or negative, given his return to the presidency? In what ways does his approach to foreign policy lead to shifts that you’re seeing in Mexico or Latin America? 

O’NEIL: Well, what’s been interesting, actually, is the Western Hemisphere has been fairly front and central over this last month, right, since he came in. You know, the inaugural address he talked about the Panama Canal and taking that back. He’s talking about Greenland. He’s talking about making Canada the fifty-first state. 

And then lots of the, you know, executive orders and pronouncements have been geared toward countries here in the Western Hemisphere, things like tariffs where he had threatened 25 percent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico if they didn’t deal with issues of immigration and security issues. He’s focused in just on the last day or two, partly because this is my world, on the sort of commerce side. You know, there’s tariffs now going in on steel and aluminum. There’s a lot of sort of action in the commercial side. 

And some of these are also—he’s using these for other things that are pretty fundamental, I think, to his worldview for decades, and one of those is less migration to the United States. And, obviously, this hemisphere is a place of lots of migration. You know, you look around the world and, you know, of the hundred-plus million people who are forcibly displaced from their homes, 20 million are here in the Western Hemisphere, so 20 percent, even though only 8 percent of the globe’s population is in the Western—or, in Latin America. So we see, you know, a big movement of people, and obviously the United States is closer than other—you know, than Europe or elsewhere. And so that’s a big focus of his administration so far and I think will continue to be as we look over the next four years. 

And then the other issue that he is using also is security, and real concerns for the United States in terms of fentanyl and in terms of other security, and focusing on, you know, our nearest neighbors there as well as a few others. 

So as I look forward, I think we have seen a pretty fundamental change in, one, the focus on the Western Hemisphere; two, on the kind of expansionist approach to the Western Hemisphere, right? I think as we were looking at the campaign we thought the Trump administration was going to be more isolationist, right? It wanted to get away from the Ukraine, wanted to get away from other things, and now we’re talking about expanding the geographic footprint of the United States into other countries here in the Western Hemisphere potentially. 

So I think that is a real shift in policy that countries in the region are grappling with. And it is one where, as I look at these next four years, I think will play differently in the hemisphere. And you will see—as back to kind of the first question of sort of what’s the leadership and how are people getting elected, we have some leaders that are getting closer to Trump. We have people like Argentina, the—you know, President Milei, who identifies very closely with Trump and his agenda. There’s President of El Salvador Bukele, who has also identified very closely, has offered lots to the Trump administration on a—on a recent trip of the secretary of state, Marco Rubio—offered to take back El Salvadorans, but offered to take back people from other nations, and even offered to take U.S. criminals if they wanted to house them in El Salvadoran jails. So you’re going to see some countries come together and work very closely, I think, with this administration. I think you’ll see other ones that push back and bristle a bit at that approach. 

So as I look at it, at Latin America, it has always been a region that has aspired to integration and coming together and never achieved that due to their own kind of domestic differences and internal politics and the like. And as I look at the overlay of U.S. foreign policy on the region, I think it is one, as I look at these next years, that will further divide countries rather than bring them together around particular issues. 

SINGH: Well, Ebenezer, over to you. What are—what are you seeing and hearing about what’s the response in Africa? And what are you anticipating as downstream consequences? 

OBADARE: So that’s a great question. I’m sure everybody in this room knows that Africa is one continent where President Trump continues to enjoy a consistently high level of support not only among everyday Africans, but especially among what you might call evangelical Africans. I’m using that approximately, not Evangelicals in the culturally specific sense in which you use it in the U.S. 

Which raises the question: Why are many Africans drawn toward the person and the iconography of President Trump? And I think it’s very simple. If you are a Christian and you’ve been—you’ve basically felt put upon by an Islamist insurgency, an insurgency that the state has not been able to undo, and there’s somebody, you know, 6,000 miles, 7,000 miles away saying, you know, I’m going to come after those guys, President Trump for these people become the symbol of the it’s good to—is the one that people expect to lead the charge and help them to tame the Islamist insurgency. 

I don’t know if many people in this room recall the last president—(inaudible)—that Nigeria had, President Buhari, paid a visit to the White House. And I remember he was sitting—standing next to then-President Bush—sorry, President Trump, President Trump 1.0, and Trump looked at President Buhari and said: Why aren’t you helping my Christian brothers and sisters? And that resonated not only in Nigeria, but in other parts of Africa. The idea that the Nigerian president was not doing enough to contain the Islamist insurgency, and the idea that contrary to that President Trump was coming to defend the interests of Christians, I think resonated powerfully. And it’s one of the reasons why many people continue to support President Trump. 

I think this is the—and insofar as that is actually the case, insofar as I think it helps us focus on the Islamist insurgency, I think it’s an excellent thing. In terms of policy, this is going to be my one, that—because I think we’ve been here before, that it’s going to be extremely important for the United States to draw a very fine distinction between Islam on the one hand and Islamism on the other hand. From the point of view of everyday Africans, the problem is not Islam; the problem is extremist Islam. So if you look at—I mean, in every part of Africa where the extreme Islamists have caught—switched to—you know, Somalia, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso—they’ve been undiscriminating in terms of their target. They fought at the state. They fought at Christians. They fought at Muslims. There is the common perception that—so, if we talk to the average Muslim, right, the problem is that those people are giving Muslims and giving Islam a bad name. 

So in terms of how we approach this, it’s going to be extremely important for President Trump not just going and say: I’m going to be the avenging angel on behalf of my Christian brothers and sisters. It’s going to be extremely important to say: The threat here is to everyday Africans, most of whom reject the extremism of the Islamists. And it’s a very—you know, very fine distinction, but I think it’s going to be an important distinction that we have to make going forward. 

SINGH: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. 

Farah, how about from your side? What would you want to say to us about the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy and how that’s affecting different communities, different regions, perhaps even in the Middle East? 

PANDITH: Yeah. So I would like to pick up by agreeing with both Shannon and Ebenezer in terms of how they lay this out. I want to talk a little bit about the person and the tone in Trump point-two, which is very different from 1.0 in some ways. 

The abrasiveness, that’s who he is. It’s how he operates. It’s how he communicates. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a distinction in the way in which he does not give respect to countries and peoples as he—as he speaks. And in the last three weeks, it’s been quite surprising and shocking for many to see how aggressive he has been around non-diplomacy, if I could put it that way, which is—which is, I think to Ebenezer’s last point, there’s a caution here on how much people can take in this. People need to be respected. People have to feel that their culture matters. When they begin to be worn down, it can change—it can change things on the ground very, very quickly. 

And I say that because you will remember that the very first country that Trump went to in his first term was, obviously Saudi Arabia, and there was this perception that he was making that distinction between Islam and violent—violence in the name of Islam. He was very open about his interest in building in the Middle East in a different way than he’s talking about building today. So I just want to say, I mean, one is the sort of tone change, this manner change. I don’t know, it’s—for a lot of different reasons it may be happening; how do I know? But all I can see is what is—what is present. It’s making people bristle. 

The second thing I will definitely tell you is this lack of respect for soft power, which has certainly—I mean, it’s not just the demolishing of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the implications that that will have on tens of thousands of lives all over—well, millions of lives all over the world, but the idea that every arm of U.S. soft power has been diminished. And I think that is really going to have an impact on the way not just people perceive Trump, but perceive our nation and Americans in general. And I think that we don’t quite know where that’s going to lead, but I can tell you already we are all understanding on the—on the very basic components. China—(laughs)—China is already taking advantage of this moment. They have already rolled out the red carpet to pick up where the U.S. has left off, not just in the continent of Africa but in other parts of the world. It makes me wonder about sort of that—I don’t event want to say balance of power, but the shifting analysis. 

Trump has called this a golden era, OK, of leadership. I think the gold is sort of a patina on a—on a mud something rather. I don’t know what it is. But it is not going to be golden and it will not be vibrant if we cannot build bridges to the other with respect. It will not be golden if, in fact, he catalyzes a new shift in the way people think about how America perceives them. And to Ebenezer’s point, it’s not obviously just Islam, it’s not just Christians; it’s everyone, every faith, in how he does that. 

And my final point is I’m turning back home for a second. You cannot be polite to people overseas of different faiths if you are not giving dignity to your own Americans of different faiths. Trust is essential for a leader. And if Trump continues the way in which he’s describing the world, and also the way he’s describing people within our country of different—with different heritages and faiths, it will impact the way in which we are perceived. And I think that that—that piece of soft-power agency that we had is going to be really troubling, and there’s going to be a real—a real problem to get around when our adversaries begin to build up forces of soft power, because we have—we have thrown it—we have thrown it away with both hands. 

SINGH: Before moving— 

PANDITH: Simran, one last thing. Forgive me. 

SINGH: Of course. 

PANDITH: You asked about the Middle East, and I don’t want to dismiss that because I think it is very, very important. Three weeks ago we had a very different expectation of how President Trump was going to deploy his diplomacy in the Middle East: bring the hostages home of course, and we had assumed—many had assumed that we would continue with the U.S. position over decades for a two-state solution. His recent comments in the last week are not just drawing—and even yesterday in the press conference with King Abdullah it was—it was shocking to hear the president say some of the things that he said. When reporters are asking him what gives you the authority to come into—to claim and take over Gaza, his response was U.S. authority, which—you know, that doesn’t exist. 

So I think the implications for the aftermath of all of these comments alongside any kind of action he’s trying to take without respect and dignity towards the Arab countries that are trying to find a solution will be a real disaster, frankly, for a lot of different reasons, including the fact that what happens in the Middle East has a ripple effect, obviously, globally. And we saw that—we saw that prior to 9/11. And as I look at it through my lens, that’s where I get very, very nervous, because if you’re looking for a radicalizing force to—for a narrative to bring people onboard to push back against America, this is a pretty great one. 

SINGH: Yeah. It sounds right on, Farah, and I—and I appreciate that point. And you know, we’ve spent the last twenty-four hours or so as a community thinking a lot about the different risks and vulnerabilities in our—in our world right now, and it is—it is a lot, and it feels like there’s no end. And so then I’m tempted to say, OK, leave us on a high note and tell us what feels good, and I’m realizing you’re speaking to a room full of religious leaders and—(laughs)—that’s not necessarily your job as much as it is mine. 

 So maybe the place I want to take this conversation is to be a little bit narrow in thinking about where you’re looking in the world and what are the biggest risks and vulnerabilities. I know there are many. We could—we could create lists of them. But if you’re looking at the next five years, we’ve heard a few words of caution from you, but what does—what strikes you as the thing that people in this room should know, that we need to be aware of and attentive to as we’re looking at our communities and our interventions? Ebenezer, maybe you could start us off here. 

OBADARE: That’s a tough question. I’m going to call your attention to two regions of Africa, and then I will try and see if I can draw a common point around them. 

So, the Sahel. Obviously, we should be interested in the Sahel. We’ve been evicted from the Sahel, and we’re trying—talking about the United States—and we’re trying to find other parts of West Africa where we can find some accommodation, have bases, really begin to build new alliances. 

And then there is the Horn of Africa, right, which is—it’s, in a sense, a basket case. It’s interesting that it’s one of the places where the first action, I think, President Trump took was to ask AFRICOM to take out some Islamic State target in Somalia. 

So you have the Horn. You have Ethiopia. You have Sudan and South Sudan. You have—you have that. And then you have, you know, all these places in the Sahel and West Africa that are radically unstable. And it seems to me that the common element here in terms of the way we think about what we are going to do and anticipating, really, some vulnerabilities is for the United States to think much more seriously about: How do we help societies in places where people are generally struggling? How do we help consolidate state power, right? Because, remember, when I—my initial comment I was talking about how there is this commonality, right? If you think on the one hand there is Pentecostalism and on the other hand there is Islamism, the common root, I think, is state power, states’ incapacity. The profound chasm that I think has opened up over the last two decades, if not more, between the states and ordinary citizens, and how we help bridge that chasm in terms of boosting state power but also helping ordinary people hold state power accountable, right, so that you begin to repair that. 

And it doesn’t then necessarily mean that you are going to get every insurgent to lay down their arms. But insofar as insurgencies, for instance, are motivated on the one hand by those who want to establish a caliphate and on the other hand by people who just—young men who really have nothing to do, who think there is—there is adventure here, there is maybe money to be made, and all of that, we can begin to claw back those who can be clawed back. The more we galvanize state power—the more we direct our resources towards state power, the more we boost the power of African states to provide infrastructure, to be responsible, and to do all those good things that the state does everywhere—I think the better chance we have, the greater possibility to reduce those risks and vulnerabilities. 

SINGH: Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you. 

Shannon, over to you. 

O’NEIL: Well, let me actually—that’s really interesting. Let me build on that a little bit in thinking about Latin America. 

And you know, Latin America by and large, the challenge isn’t sort of state presence and capacity as much as it is. It’s there. And you know, my—what worries me but what also—I’d like to be a little glass half-full, so just—(laughter)— 

SINGH: Thank you. 

O’NEIL: —you know, but also which inspires me a bit is that, you know, democracy in Latin America, for all of the travails and problems, has kind of held, right? This is a country where 500 million—or, a(n) area that—where 500 million people by and large live under a democracy. Now, it’s a little bit—it’s got its bumps. It’s got its, you know, messiness and the like. But they have chosen that again and again. And so there are more people living under democracy in Latin America than in Europe, Western Europe; in the United States; in places with much higher per capita incomes, with bigger safety nets and the like. This is a region that is buffeted by, you know, poverty, by inequality, but violence, by all kinds of things where people would give up on their governments and ask for a solution. And by and large, they haven’t. So I—the glass half-full to me is like, wow, this is a place, a bunch of middle-income countries with lots of challenges that have managed to kind of stick it through and vote for, you know, a place with checks and balances, and more openness, and the like. So that’s my sort of helps me go to sleep at night. 

What wakes me up in the middle of the night is I’m not sure how long that’s going to hold. And, yes, we’re seeing this across the world. We’re seeing, you know, populism, and we’re seeing outside candidates, and we’re seeing strongmen—and it’s always strong men, almost always—and you’re seeing that, too, in the region. You’re starting to see a fragmentation. You’re starting to see people give up—you know, if you could just bring security to my neighborhood, I don’t really care how I’m governed, right; if you could just bring opportunity. And so I think we have this in—generally in the Western Hemisphere, we have a really strong repository of faith in democracy and in citizens participating, and that that is the way to go, and the, you know, human rights and citizen rights and things that go with that, but it’s starting to be eroded. And what we have seen a number of times is where people get elected into office and then they use that election to undermine the ability for the next person to get elected. 

And just to put on—back to the question about sort of U.S. policy and Farah’s point about soft power, you know, I would say for all of—you know, the United States has a bit of a, you know, at times mixed track record in Latin America in terms of supporting governments and the like. But I would say in recent years it has been quite supportive of democracy. I think you could argue that the popularly elected president of Guatemala today would not be in office today if the United States hadn’t supported and gotten him to the inauguration day versus other forces that were not democratically elected, let’s say. So I think we have played a pretty constructive role in some places over the last ten or twenty years. And I do think, as I look at this first month of the Trump administration, this is not going to be a priority of the incoming—or, of the current administration to keep that going in the region. So that does give me a bit of pause. 

SINGH: Farah, how about over to you? 

PANDITH: Oh, gosh. I don’t know if I have any good news, but I don’t—I’m not really that optimistic, I have to say. I don’t want to be doom and gloom, but I’m not really—I’ve got to be honest. I am very concerned about the last point Shannon made about democracy and our—it’s impossible to say democracy is important around the world if we’re not doing it here at home. It is impossible for us to say that pluralism matters when it doesn’t here at home. You know, I mean, it’s like we have got to hold a mirror up to ourselves and understand our power outside of the United States depends on our capacity to build the kind of forces that we say—or, the strong society that we say that we are. 

But I do want to say a couple of other things. One is I don’t—I look at this as a business-first era, not America first. I see it as business first. And I think that there’s opportunity with business to actually think about some of the social things that we had not necessarily thought about in their—in their hands. And I am not talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion; I am talking about the stability that they need for their businesses to actually thrive, and so that their shareholders get the money that they want. And I’m looking at it perfectly through that lens. They may—they may not want to get involved in conversations about democracy versus authoritarianism. They may not want to talk about polarization. But they do need—they need customers and they need stability to actually do the work that they do. 

So, toward that end, I would say when you asked that, Simran, you know, what can we in this audience think about, I would be thinking really around how we can mobilize sort of a different sector to think about some of our issues a little bit differently, whether that is, you know, the funding of various tools in communities that can help bridge divides around the world, whether it is thinking more openly about the way in which we understand the power to impact identity through brands and other things. We just came out of the Super Bowl. It’s fascinating to me to listen to the conversation in America and around the world around this halftime show. That is a perfect way of actually looking at the point that I’m making: Are there things that can be done? 

The other thing I want to talk about is technology. We haven’t really spent any money there—any time on that. And I think it’s not just the acceleration, obviously, of AI and other technology tools that are going to be important to us as we think about mis- and disinformation, polarization, authoritarianism, all that kind of stuff, but I’m looking at it from the perspective—and this is what gives me hope—the people that are controlling the social media platforms that everybody uses on planet Earth today are not the right generation. We’re going to see new platforms and new inventions that come out of much younger demographics that will actually be interesting at a speed that we don’t know yet, because we don’t know how technology is moving. But I will tell you, as somebody who was at the State Department when the first person at State made a tweet, and everybody went crazy and thought this is the worst thing ever, and how can America even think about that, how cute and quaint that we thought that way. (Laughter.) I mean, how adorable. How adorable. 

So I think about this from, like, OK, cool, we’re going to get twenty—19-, 20-, 21-year-olds who are in college right now who are coming up with that next thing, that next thing that’s going to revolutionize the way we think about ourselves and think about the planet, and mobilize their peers to be able to do something. That’s where I have hope. 

SINGH: Thank you. That’s a great—that’s a great way to end this part of the conversation. 

We’ll move into the question-and-answer portion. And if you have questions, please feel free to raise your hands. I’ll try and call on some folks. I’ll ask you to stand, wait for the mic, and offer us your name and affiliation. 

So we’ll start up here for the first one, and then a hand way in the back there, at the back table. 

Q: My name is Darius (sp). I’m from Syracuse, New York, and I am a teacher at a liberal arts college. 

My question is actually pointed to Ebenezer. He’s an African; I’m an African. So the question is related to what I already shared in my—our discussion group. And the question therefore is, and in the context of the hot spots in Africa, I just don’t know whether the world cares about Africa. There are things that are happening elsewhere and people are crying foul. And I come from the northeastern part of Africa, and you talk about the Sahel. Sudan today, as we speak, lots and lots of refugees are in Chad, dislodged from their homelands by two military generals, whose help seem not to be—by themselves. There are external forces, actors, that have come to exacerbate the conflict. That is after the Darfur genocide. 

So my question, therefore, to you, first for Darfur or Sudan, is: How come that the world seem not to care while other powers are using the local wars, but actually not because they love Sudan but they love to exploit the natural resources? To me, that’s a neocolonial element right there. And so they exacerbate it. They don’t care about the people who are suffering. In Darfur, when the Chinese came there, they wanted oil. They don’t care whether people are dying; they just want oil. 

Second, in Central Africa, which is my part of the world, in Congo, the M23 as we speak overtook a town, and they had a civil war that took too long, external force. Other African countries, including South Africa and others, are sending forces there to support the government. And then the rebels are getting their support from elsewhere. So my question, then, and my comment to all of you since most of you are from the CFR, is that: Can you help me out here on how can you address these issues? That’s how—this is not the African peoples, but it is people from outside who have come to exploit the natural resources for their own ends. 

And then we had a question—and this is the third—do we care? Who cares for us in the eyes of the world? 

Second—(laughter)—yeah. And the other question is that I ask all of us here as we reflect on this, what is the role of the United Nations? It was created to bring peace among peoples, but what is happening today they seem not to care. We don’t seem to hear anybody talking about it. So I want you to help me out here. How can we educate our young people here and elsewhere to recognize the evil forces that are external, that exacerbate the local conflicts? That are not necessarily based on religion, but on ethnicity, which is one element which I think most of you never really explained a little bit. I think when we talk of religion, we should add ethnicities. That’s a big problem in the world. In Africa we begin to isolate ourselves based on our ethnicity. Thank you.  

SINGH: Thank you. Appreciate it. Ebenezer, I invite you to offer a response here.  

OBADARE: So thank you, sir. This is an extremely complex and complicated question. (Laughter.) And I’m not going to try and answer. I hope we can stay in touch so that we can benefit from each other. I’m going to disagree with you just a little bit on the larger point about whether the world cares about Africa. It’s interesting we’re having this conversation in the aftermath of the apparent dismantling of USAID. And one of the things that has sort of come out is how much the United States has put towards different initiatives in Africa over the last fifty years. Three years ago, 2023, the United States gave Nigeria a billion dollars for humanitarian aid, right? Since 1960, when most African countries became independent, till now, Western countries have given in various human, development, whatever kind of aid, an estimated $2.6 trillion to African countries. 

Sometimes I think outsiders care too much, not that they don’t care. I think the fundamental question for me—and I know this is big. I’ve written about this. I’m willing to continue this conversation. Is at what point do we begin to take the agency of African countries seriously? And at what point do we say, hold on, yes, we want support. We want people to care. Obviously, when you’re thinking about Sudan, you want the world to care, right? You want the conflict to stop, and all of that. But when I think of Sudan, I don’t immediately think about the United Nations. I think about the African Union. What’s the African Union doing?  

Where do African countries commit their resources to, right? How are those resources managed? A billion dollars in Nigeria is more than a trillion there, right? If you go to Nigeria today and show me how that money was spent, you’re going to struggle to find it. So we can balance things here. We can think about how the rest of the world thinks about Africa. I get that. But I think for me, I think it’s much more important to ask very fundamental questions of African countries. How are resources distributed? Which countries are making money, and what are they doing with the money? How can we help those people that have been put upon by African states to get up and make something of their lives? So it’s an extremely complicated thing. I think there’s a slight disagreement between us, but in a brotherly African manner we can continue to discuss it. (Laughter.) 

SINGH: Thank you. In the back table over there. Yes, please. 

Q: Thank you very much for a wonderful presentation on all the—part of all the panelists. And thanks, Simran, for your moderating of this session. My name is Saffet Catovic. I’m with Justice for All. 

Just a quick observation and a question. The observation is thank you very much for your uplifting the fact that Muslims—African Muslims themselves are the targets of the extremist groups as well, including the scholarship. Muslim scholars around the world, going back to the ISIS debacle—and it’s still there in various forms—have put themselves front and center in calling out this extremist distortion of Islam, and therefore put themselves in harm’s way from these various extremist groups and are being targeted because of that. So the importance of calling out those who are extremists within our religious communities, especially when there’s a violent aspect to what they are doing, needs to be something that all religious, I think, communities need to look at.  

But my question is not going to build so much on the issue of countries but on the issue of corporations. To what extent are the interests of corporations, especially in the extractive industries since mentioned Nigeria and a couple of the areas, involved in fomenting these various extremist groups, because every extremist group does not exist on air alone. Someone is providing the money. Somebody’s providing the weapons. How do they—how do corporate interests play into this? Because it seems to me whenever we’re talking about issues within countries or about countries, we never mention those corporate interests that are involved at the global level in much more powerful ways than many governments can be involved in.  

So to what extent are they involved in fomenting? And to what extent are these groups somehow part and parcel or fomented by the geopolitics of the various big nations, but also the nations amongst themselves within Africa, specifically, speaking of Africa, and their particular national interests vis-à-vis their neighbors? Thank you.  

SINGH: Thank you. Appreciate that question. I don’t if—Ebenezer, if you want to— 

OBADARE: I can quickly respond to that. Thank you, sir.  

I think the question of resources is actually very simple. It’s not complicated, right? So different African countries have different resources. So let’s take Niger. Niger has plenty of uranium. The question is always, it’s one thing to have resources. The question is, what are you going to do with it? The fact that outsiders are interested in your resources, that’s not a problem. It will be a good thing. The fact that the United States wants oil from Nigeria, as far as I’m concerned, I said, bring it on. The question it raises is not about external agency. It’s about internal agency, right? I have resources. I’m an independent country. You can’t forcibly take it from me, right? There has to be a structure.  

Many of these countries actually can’t do anything without external assistance with those resources. Niger does not have the resources, the technology, the know-how, to mine uranium. It needs outsiders. It’s up to Niger to then say, I’m going to deal with Russia and not the United States. That’s Niger’s prerogative. But the mere presence of resources in an African country and the fact that outsiders are interested in those resources does not equal exploitation. You always have the right to determine who you do business with. That law applies to all countries. It should apply to African countries as well. In the Nigerian delta, the problem is not that Chevron is there, Shell is there, Total. All of them want to do business. Nigeria can’t drink the oil. The question is, when the money is made from those resources, where does it go? Does it head to Swiss bank accounts? (Laughs.) 

O’NEIL: Let me just add to that. We have somewhat a natural experiment that’s happened over the last ten years in the fact that the country of Guyana, population size 700,000 people, has gone from a small, tropical country to the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Just, you know, only the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia being more sophisticated. And so you have a very small country, very small population, that all of a sudden has all these resources. And they are—and they’re a democracy. And they are struggling, but they’re thinking about how do you deal with such bounty and largess? How do you make sure that that money goes into building schools, and roads, and airports, and ports, and all that sort of thing, and a diversified economy, and all of these sorts of things, versus ending up in, you know, you know, condominiums in Miami or in other places around the world.  

So I think it is kind of an interesting—and I would say—I’m not saying that corporations are doing a great job of that, but there are a number of corporations, international oil companies, who are there, who are investing a good amount of resources to try to build those institutional structures and checks and balances. Because, you know, yes, they want the best deal they can get, but they also, as they call it, above-ground risk, you don’t want a rapacious government because it, in the end, comes back to you as well. So I think there’s different ways that corporations interact. And this is something—we’ll see where Guyana ends up ten years from now, but it is sort of an active experiment in progress. Does it become Norway or does it become Venezuela? We’ll find out. 

SINGH: Yeah. Thank you here in the green sweater. Azza, I see you back there as well. 

Q: I’m Robin Mohr, clerk of Green Street Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Philadelphia.  

And my question is, given the divides and the mutual deprecation between evangelical Christians and Catholics and indigenous religious practices in Latin America that are simmering below the attention of most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, is there a risk that those—that the U.S. will stoke those divisions into a proxy for economic and political forces, in the way that U.S. organizations—U.S. churches, have done in African countries, like Uganda, for example? 

SINGH: Thank you.  

O’NEIL: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, as I look at—and a little bit of playing off of Ebenezer’s way of thinking about African countries, there’s a lot of agency there. It’s not just sort of the outside corporations or governments coming in. Is I don’t see—I mean, you have had local leaders in various countries try to foment those differences, right? Try to build up their political support, or their economic support, or others through those divisions. And I haven’t seen super successful versions. Sometimes at a very local level in, like, a local town or the like. But I haven’t seen it really take off on a broader stage generally. Now it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. And we are seeing—I will say, we are seeing more polarization in these societies. We are seeing in many countries what had been kind of traditional political parties fragment and disappear in many places.  

And, you know, the benefits—you know, we can all talk about the problems of political parties. But the benefits of political parties is they bring people together, they represent people, and they sort of galvanize it together. When you don’t have a political party then what fills the vacuum? And it can be particular, you know, identities. It can be particularly faiths. It can be particular ethnicities, and the like, that become much more polarizing. It’s very obvious who’s in and who’s out, right? You can’t choose your ethnicity, necessarily. You can’t choose—so I’m not saying that that challenge isn’t there, but I don’t yet see it sort of fomenting. And I think if it was going to happen, it would come from inside rather than coming from the United States or the places outside. 

SINGH; Thank you. Azza in the back. 

Q: Thanks very much. Azza Karam from Lead Integrity. Thank you. Excellent, excellent panel, and wonderful to revive after lunch and after plenty of good things.  

Just wanted to say a couple of—one particular comment. Ebenezer, I really appreciated how you highlighted the fact that some of these religious movements have plenty to do with the state itself not being able to deliver on basic social contracts. That’s a very good point, and it applies everywhere. What I’m a little bit uncomfortable about is how you’ve managed to give us several labels. One is extremist Islam, Islamist fundamentalist. And then you said something about that’s not so positive, but the positive is Pentecostal movements. And I just wanted to say it’s a bit too simplistic, and it’s a bit complicated. Because there’s no such thing as extreme Islam unless there is, of course, extreme Christianity, extreme Judaism, extreme everything else.  

And I think the whole point here that you are making is that politicized religion, that veers towards an absolute justification of violence, is a problem. In which case, it really isn’t about extreme Islam. And I’d love us to say—because you made the very good point that we need to be clear how we use our words and be—and distinguish between the religion the—in this case Islam, for some reason, even though Christianity itself could do with some disengagement, or being disengaged with some of the religious nationalist movements in its own name. But I think if we can just identify—keep aside, even amongst ourselves in this room, understand that it’s not about Islam or Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism, or whatever it is. But we are talking about movements that are political, very political, in terms of their ambition to power, who are also justifying the use of violence. And they have to be distinguished.  

So even within the political Islamic context, Islamism, they’re actually—they’re not all advocating for violence. There are Islamist movements that are not violent. And I think it’s important for us to begin to be a bit more clear about that distinction so that we can also be clear about Islam, but also Islamism is very diverse, is very hybrid. There’s enough experts in the room who can speak to that. So just as a Muslim, it immediately raises my—whatever, the hair is on my neck—when I hear about is extremist Islam, because I’m like, excuse me, who? That is my faith. And there ain’t no extremism in it. There are people who will abuse it, absolutely.  

But then maybe more helpful, especially given the point that Farah was raising about—and kudos about using the term “cultural intelligence,” an absolutely brilliant term. Very strategic. Something that is deeply lacking even within the United Nations, but certainly within the United States. I think the point is that we don’t have enough cultural intelligence because we think of it as soft power. What if that soft power was one of the hardest pieces of power we got? And if we see it that way, then can we please begin to appreciate that religion is part of culture, instead of this traditional 1970s silo that says culture is here, religion is over there, and the two—and never the twain shall meet, when in fact they are part and parcel of one another. Because if we understand that there’s such a thing as cultural intelligence, then we also understand that we have to be religiously adaptable, and flexible, and intelligent.  

So when it comes to fundamentalism, which was originally coined with Christianity not Islam, when it comes to this movement we have to also understand where all the religious fundamentalists come together and agree and are in perfect harmony is on the issues of gender. They have many disagreements on plenty other things, but when it comes to women and gender, oh boy, oh boy, do we have a happy society. So therefore, when we’re looking at trying to counter some of that phobia, we have to be able to see that we have allies across the religions and the cultural dynamics, rather than in fundamentalist spaces only, or Pentecostal is pro, and one is against. Sorry, I get very emotional about this, but, darn, this matters. Thank you. (Applause.) 

SINGH: Thank you. Ebenezer, I’d invite you to respond. And, Farah, I’d also love to hear your perspective, given your work on countering violent extremism. And maybe you could perhaps offer us a way of thinking about these things that might be helpful. So, Ebenezer. 

OBADARE: Let me see if I can—see if we can come to the same sense. Because I hear you, but I think I fundamentally disagree with you. (Laughter.) So initially when I—my preliminary comment, remember I said—when I was talking about Pentecostalism I said, there’s a footnote to that. And when talked about Islam, I said there’s a footnote. Meaning I’m aggregating a lot of things. There’s a lot to unpack. And there is a risk of creating a polarity where Pentecostalism is positive, Islamism is negative. That’s not what I was trying to say. I had more to say about that.  

But here is where I disagree with you. There is fundamentalist Islam, right? Just give me a second. So let—it’s interesting you mentioned gender. You’ve heard about Yousafzai Malala. The people in the village, the old men in that village—and I’ve seen variations of them—who say a young girl cannot go to school because my faith says, X, Y, Z, those are fundamentalist Muslims. Those are extremist Muslims. Those are Islamists. When I use those—let me finish. When I use those terms I’m consciously trying to make a distinction between Islam and Islamism. I’m respecting the fact that majority of Muslims do not agree with that interpretation of Islam. But it is not true that there are not people/elements out there who do. The whole project of Islamic State is exactly that, the iconography is very specific. The whole project of Al-Shabaab is, what? Is exactly that.  

In order to be able to properly counter their violent ideology, we have to call it what it is. That’s why I’m making a distinction between Islam, what majority of Muslims practice especially in the part of the world where I come from, and Islamism. Islamism says: I am right, you are dead. Islam says we can all live together in peace. I think the decision is extremely essential, and it should be underscored. 

SINGH: Farah, I’d love for you to offer some perspective here.  

PANDITH: Oh, sure, Simran. Throw me to the wolves. That’s great. (Laughter.)  

OBADARE: No, it’s not mere words. It’s extremely—people are people on the basis of it. Islamism is what we’re against, not Islam. That was what I said initially.  

PANDITH: I’m making—I’m trying to make a joke, only because I adore Simran and we are old friends, and I know that we’re past the time at CFR. And this is a really difficult conversation. I have two things to say with respect to the question and the comment that was made.  

One is the point about lexicon is an essential one. And that is a point that we have struggled with since 9/11, frankly, and even, by the way, before 9/11 around 1979, during the Iran hostage crisis, certainly with the Salman Rushdie fatwa situation in 1989. This has been an ongoing problem, that terminology and words are used in difficult ways. I will tell you—Simran, you asked me directly vis-à-vis work on countering violent extremism. It’s so complex to talk about terms and uses of words. It has been the bane of my existence, which is why it is very uncommon with—which I did on this panel—I used the word that was used earlier, Islamist, which I usually do not use because people interpret it in different ways.  

What I usually talk about is using religion in the name of their ideology or a weaponized religious force. Many more words, far more complicated, really annoying to have to keep doing that. But it’s because I don’t want to, A, make people think that I at all am speaking about a religion, a faith. I don’t want to disrespect the people. I don’t—I mean, all of the things that we know. And I also want to say that this is tied into—and we haven’t talked at all about the way language has been used in a post October 7th situation. But I think it is worth saying that there are parallels to what the person raised, and certainly what was said on the stage, in terms of being careful about what it is we’re saying.  

So all I want to say to this is I agree that lexicon matters. Terminology is very complex. And, actually, in my experience as the former special representative to Muslim communities, I could not get a uniform definition of any of the terms that have been used today across communities as diverse as Malaysia, Guyana, Norway, Canada. No matter where I spoke and to whom I spoke, it didn’t—it was not the same thing. So I want to be clear that as we speak about people that weaponize any religion—whether they weaponize Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Islam, or Judaism, or Christianity, and everything in between—we all understand the force of—the force that they’re using to be able to prey upon the identity, which is why they’re doing it.  

So I just will say, with respect, I know that everybody today is trying to come together to build a stronger force as we go forward. And, with respect, I do know that people are going to mishear and have mistakes in the way in which they speak from a particular person’s viewpoint. I think we have to—we have to agree to a little bit—slightly more understanding and open if people are not necessarily using terminology that we would use, and to do exactly what was done today, which is to inquire why a particular person used a particular phase so that we go into this with understanding and we can—we can find a way to speak with respect with each other. 

SINGH: Thank you, Farah. 

It looks like we have time for one more question. I see a gentleman here in the table here. 

Q: Hi. Good afternoon. I’m Anthony Cruz Pantojas. I’m the humanist chaplain at Tufts University.  

I just wanted to slightly amplify what the colleague mentioned. If human beings are producers and facilitators of culture, then what culture, histories, and codes are we utilizing in the eye of our imagination to cultivate relationships? And specifically, how are we doing that across and through difference? And that’s for anyone in the panel.  

SINGH: Thank you. Anyone feel ready to take that one on? Please. 

OBADARE: What’s the Nazi general who said, whenever I heard the world “culture,” I reached for my revolver?  

O’NEIL: Goebbels? 

OBADARE: Was it? 

O’NEIL: Maybe? I don’t know. 

OBADARE: Was it—yeah, or Goering? I don’t remember. It’s such a—look, again, this could be part of a larger conversation. But let me just provoke it just a little bit, right? Yes, I think it’s important to bring all cultures together. I think intercultural understanding is extremely important. It should be encouraged. But I think it’s important not to fetishize culture or valorize it unnecessarily. People do a lot of evil in the name of culture. A lot of terrible things hide and have been hidden under that category. If there’s anything I would like to encourage us to do, maybe I’m going back to Malala here. Malala was being stopped from actualizing herself as a young woman in the name of a particular ideology/culture.  

I think human liberty is much more important than culture, right? And for me, wherever cultural claims meet individual claims, I always rule in the name, in favor of the individual, because in terms of the scholarship and in terms of lived experience I’ve seen so many perverse uses of culture. And sometimes the best way to stop anybody from doing—so I’ve known people invoke culture to legitimate domestic violence, right? In instances like that, you have to be able to go above and beyond and say, I don’t care about your culture. I care about the woman that you are beating up. So it’s a very complex thing. Yes, intercultural understanding. But we should be very careful to also scrutinize the claims of culture. They’re not always what they appear to be on the surface. 

SINGH: I received a—I think the organizers received a signal of the energy in the room and are giving us an extra ten minutes. (Laughter.) 

OBADARE: Wow.  

SINGH: So more conversation, which I’m happy about. I know a lot of the sessions have felt like we wanted to talk a little bit more. Daisy, I see your hand up in the back there, and then maybe Anwar over there as well. 

Q: Thank you so much. I’m just going to continue after Azza. I’m Daisy Khan. I’m the—(laughter)—pass it around to all the Muslims.  

First of all, I think, Farah, you made a great point about which intelligence? Cultural intelligence. I would ask you to add two more to that. One is spiritual intelligence, because that is really important at a time like this, because we all have spiritual intelligence and we all operate from that. And also emotional intelligence. We need that as well. So maybe we can think about doing this.  

Since 9/11 we have been dealing with how Islam is framed in the media. There are two billion Muslims that live in the world. One-fourth of humanity, I guess, is Muslim. Out of every four people, one is a Muslim. And our community has been so traumatized by the weaponization of our religion and our inability to do anything about it that I was forced to write a book on it. I’m happy to give that to you, sir, because I really think you need to read that, because you have said a lot of things here today that do not sit well with practicing Muslims, or Muslims who know that what terrorists are doing is not—is un-Islamic, basically. So all these groups, these names, the fundamentalist is a Christian term. We Muslims don’t even have that term. We don’t know what you’re saying when you say that.  

There’s nothing radical about Islam. Islam is a verb. Islam is not an institution. It’s a verb. It’s an action that we do. We submit to the will of God. So you have to understand Islam. You have to understand our mindset to see how we respond to what you have just said. So I would suggest that all of these terms that have the link with Islam should be delinked once and for all. Islam is a religion. If you have to give any name, then Muslims are individuals that are extremists, there are Muslim terrorists, there are Muslim extremists, there are Muslim radicals. But I would say that don’t even use that. Use the term that they go by. They all have names. They all give themselves names. It’s Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, al-Qaida. Just use their names and let the rest of us decide who they are.  

Because by linking Islam and saying radical Islam, and all you’re doing is perpetuating that negative mindset that people have about Islam already because of what has happened with the wars and the terrorist attacks. And it affects all of us. Our community gets affected by it. So I’m asking you to please be cautious. This is very important because our president says things like radical Islam. And then imagine every person then begins to think that it’s radical Islam. So Islam is an Abrahamic religion. It’s no different than Christianity. It’s no different than Judaism. Our book validates Christianity. Our book validates Judaism. So we need to be very conscious of that, that when you say Islam you’re talking about God. You’re discrediting God. I just want you to know that. So I think I’ve spoken on behalf of everybody. Thank you so much. (Laughter.) 

Q: Thank you. My name is Anwar Khan. I’m with Spark Consulting, formally with Islamic Relief, as a cofounder, for thirty years. 

I was in Srebrenica. I went there. I did not blame Christian fundamentalists for that slaughter, that genocide of Muslims in Srebrenica. In 2017, I was in Rakhine state in Myanmar. I did not blame Buddhist or Buddhist fundamentalist for that. The point that Azza was making earlier, I want to expound on that. Language matters. Language matters. I was the other growing up in London. My mosque was burnt when I was ten by people who would tell you they were cultural Christians. My neighbor was murdered four doors down, Desli Makhtar (ph), because she wore a hijab, she was Muslim. That wasn’t called Christian extremism.  

We need to be careful. I was in Hebron. I saw what Baruch Goldstein did when forty people were massacred when they were praying, facing towards the Kaaba, and they were slaughtered over there. I don’t blame Jewish groups. I blame the individuals and, as Daisy mentioned, the groups which go to that. You’re talking a lot about Malala. Malala lives in Birmingham. And if Malala was here, she might have an issue with the way you keep on bandying her name around and her culture, and she could speak more than others. I’m sick of people telling me we’re protecting women in Afghanistan by starving them with sanctions. We’re protecting the women of Iraq by starving them with sanctions.  

I’ve seen this for over thirty years. I prayed over the graves of these people. So please, I don’t need a savior complex from people sitting over here with whatever color they are. We’ve heard enough of that. To me, maybe I was triggered. I heard enough of this after 9/11. I thought we had moved past this. The word “Islamist” is a loaded term. What kind of Muslim is an Islamist? I was just discussing this at breakfast. Call the people murderers, who they are. Dalai Lama said this very nicely, and I think he was on Fox News of all places, when they asked him. And he said, there isn’t Muslim extremist or terrorist. There isn’t Christian. There isn’t Buddhist. Those are terrorists. Those are extremists. They are not from their faith.  

Yes, they use the name of their faith. I agree with you on that. Let’s not play their game. Let’s not play—yes, they’re playing their iconography. They’re trying to say that they’re from the Abbasid caliph, or whatever the ISIS—don’t play their game. Don’t make them at the level that they want to be. Don’t call them what they want to be called. Call them their actual name. They want to be seen as the true representative of Islam. As Daisy mentioned, they do not do that. Here, we’re with intelligent people, people with empathy. The words you’re using is offending us and dehumanizing us. Later on down the line, when you call someone Islamist you can do a drone attack. How many people in KPK were killed by drone attacks by people saying that they’re liberating these women by killing them in the name of liberating them from their local culture? We need to be careful, please. 

SINGH: Thank you. I know many of you who have spoken. And many of you know me. And I’m a scholar of religion. I’ve been teaching and writing about Islam for quite some time. I’m teaching Islamic history these days, which confuses a lot of people when I say I’m not actually Muslim. (Laughs.) So it’s a—you know, a running joke in my family. 

And I hear the pain, and I think we all do. And I think we resonated. And I know that many of you think and work and write on these kinds of issues. And so you know that I am sympathetic to the kinds of concerns you’re raising. And I also want to offer, just as we wrap up here, that there is also a real challenge that we have to figure out as a community about how are we going to talk about this stuff if there are no words we can use to describe people who identify as Muslim, they themselves claim to be Muslim, and then commit violence in the name of their faith? If we don’t have words for that, then how are we going to get our messages across?  

Similarly, if we are living in a culture where people do the same thing on the basis of their Christian identity, and we don’t talk about that, we see what the problem of that is, right? So, I think it’s up to us to figure out a solution in the way that Farah was describing earlier, right? Like, this is complex. It’s really hard. It’s really important. But the solutions clearly are not going to be coming from the outside. How do we take seriously people who claim a religion and then perform violence in the name of that religion—how do we take those claims seriously, while also understanding that that not might be our understanding of that same tradition? It’s hard. And it’s especially hard when you belong to the tradition and have your own version of what that tradition tells you.  

And so I just wanted to offer that as perhaps something that we, as a community, can be thinking about and working towards, because it’s been a long time, right? Daisy mentioned 9/11. That’s 25 years ago now. Where are we going and how are we making progress? And perhaps this is a good place to start. So thank you to our to conversationalists—Farah, Shannon, Ebenezer. (Applause.) 

(END) 

This is an uncorrected transcript.