 My name is Knox Tames. I'm a senior fellow at Pepperdine University, and I'm also a senior visiting expert here at the US Institute of Peace. And I'm here today to talk about the nexus of religious freedom and global peace and security. Religious actors are everywhere, and the role of religion is involved in every society around the world. Religions, beliefs guide the actions of men and women in ways both positive and negative. So if peacemakers want to get at the crux of conflicts that are dividing communities that are leading to violence, leading to instability, understanding the religious dynamics, understanding the religious landscape, and understanding how openness to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief can help deescalate violent narratives is a crucial piece of that puzzle, and peacemakers would be wise to understand that and appreciate it. You look at the effort to counter the devastation that ISIS wrought in northern Iraq, efforts to re-establish religious life for the tapestry of different religious groups that had lived in Sinjar and Nineveh for millennia or more. It's been a key piece of reconstituting that society, enabling churches to meet for worship, to rebuild, enabling Yazidis to reconstruct their temples, allowing smaller communities like the Sibian Mendians, the Shabbat, the Kaqai, also Baha'is or Astrians, all giving them the space to live out their beliefs peacefully without fear of violence or discrimination. We've seen communities return and start to reintegrate in a way that's hopefully over the long term going to see that country start to pivot back towards a stable, prosperous, and democratic country that respects the rights of all of its citizens. USIP has played a foundational role in helping the United States engage on religious freedom internationally. From the very first discussions in the late 1990s, USIP hosted scholars and academics and experts to think about how can the United States play that indispensable role that we often do on this fundamental value that's so connected to our own narrative, our own history, our own effort to support civil rights. And so in the ensuing years USIP has continued to provide space for thought and scholarship. I've been affiliated with the Institute now for three years, thinking about the role of religion societies, the engagement of human rights principles, and what does that mean to de-escalation, to stability, to creating the world we all want to see, a world that's in the US' United States' vested interests, that has a reflection of our values and of our security interests.