 Good morning and welcome to those joining us here at the United States Institute of Peace in person and those watching the live stream of the event online. The United States Institute of Peace is a national, non-partisan, independent institute founded by Congress and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical and essential for U.S. and global security. In conflict zones abroad, the institute works with local partners to prevent and mitigate and resolve violent conflict. USIP works with governments and civil societies to build local capacities to manage conflict peacefully. The institute pursues this mission by linking research, policy, training, analysis and direct action to support those who are working to build a more peaceful and inclusive world. We're so grateful to have you join the conversation today in whatever format has worked best for you. I am Paul Washakaker, the interim, the currently the interim director of the Religion and Inclusive Societies team here at USIP. The Religion and Inclusive Societies team is the oldest continuous running functional team at USIP. Given religion's influence on conflict dynamics around the world, we realize at USIP that it is critical that practitioners and policymakers understand and partner with religious leaders and people of faith to build peace. For more than 25 years, the US Institute of Peace has worked on the role of religion in violence and peace, advancing cutting-edge research and policy and developing effective strategies to engage religious actors, institutions and ideas across traditions in support of peace. From enhancing the peacemaking capacities of individuals and faith and religious-based organizations to fostering meaningful dialogue within and across faiths, USIP works with local partners to promote inclusive religious peacebuilding. Our discussion today is framed around USIP's new special report, Global Trends and Challenges to Protecting and Promoting Religious Freedom of Belief or Religion or Belief, which is co-authored by doctors Jason Klocek and Scott Bledsoe. We're partnering today with Nottingham University's School of Politics and International Relations. This research was USIP-led and USAID-supported and critically reflects on the relationship between forb, peace and development. You'll hear more today about its key findings from the lead author of the report. USIP has a long track record of engagement on religious freedom issues, both in Washington and in the field. David Little, the first USIP senior scholar in religion, ethics and human rights, was deeply involved in the mid-1990s to create the current US government religious freedom structure. For instance, he served from 1996 to 1998 as a member of Secretary Albright's advisory committee on religious freedom abroad, a precursor to the IRF office and USERF. Today, USIP's regional centers in conjunction with the religion and inclusive societies team engage on religious freedom issues to build peace and greater stability. Among the global settings where USIP is currently engaged and where religious freedom issues are central in conflict and peace-building dynamics include Afghanistan, Myanmar, Iraq and Pakistan. In order to advance and inform efforts seeking to facilitate bipartisan cooperation on international religious freedom and to protect a non-partisan approach and space for centrist dialogue on this issue, USIP also established a working group on US international religious freedom promotion and finding common ground. And we have compiled those recommendations in a forthcoming report. But today's report and today's event come at a pivotal time. On the one hand, our discussion today follows on from two major international convenings for the protection and promotion of Forbes this summer. One being the International Religious Freedom Summit that took place here in Washington this past June. The other was the UK hosted ministerial on Forbes convened at the start of last month. Those events represent significant opportunities to recommit, re-evaluate and broaden efforts to advance Forbes and other human rights for all. On the other hand, we know that despite ongoing efforts by the international community, Forbes violations continue to increase around the world. This is not just based on anecdotal evidence, but global data sets that you'll hear more about during today's event. And even in cases that brought hope just a few years ago, we are seeing reasons to be wary. In Sudan, for example, reports are circulating of accusations and arrests for apostasy, even though those laws have been officially repealed. We are also witnessing governments increasing the regulation of and restrictions on religious minorities, not just in physical space, but also online. Such as new threats emerging in Myanmar that verbal written or online post-insulting Buddhism will be punished by law. And there is a continued concern about what Taliban rule in Afghanistan means for women and religious minorities. It is against this backdrop that USIP partnered with USAID to critically reflect on what we know and what we think we know about the causes and consequences of Forbes, especially as Forbes relates to peace and development. We hope today's discussion as well as the report helps to move us in some modest way toward a more nuanced and strategic policy and programming to advance Forbes for other human rights and for all. With that in mind, our event today will run in four parts. Jason will begin by providing an overview of the study, its key findings and recommendations from the special report. We will then hear from those who actually collect and manage the data sets analyzed for the special report. First, we have a pre-recorded reflection from Dr. Jonathan Fox, the Yehuda Anwar Professor of Religion and Politics at Bar-Ilan University. Jonathan is the initiator of and continues to manage the religion and state data set, which covers data on government and societal discrimination of religion from 1990 to 2014. Jonathan will elaborate on some of the trends, our report notes, as well as highlight the value of and need for more evidence-based policy and programming to advance Forbes. The Pew Research Center's Samira Mujmodar will then speak to us about the most recent round of Pew data collection on global religious restrictions and what those data sets tell us about global trends and challenges to protecting and promoting Forbes for all. The special report could only draw on data up to 2016 with a particular focus on 2014, as that is the year with the most overlap across data sets. So we are particularly grateful to hear how Pew's updated data might relate to our findings. The third part of today's event will feature a reflection on programmatic implications of the trends and challenges identified in the special report by Adam Nicholas Phillips. Adam is the Acting Deputy Assistant Administrator and Executive Director of the Local Faith and Transformative Partnerships Hub in the Bureau for Democracy, Development and Innovation at the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. That is a mouthful, Adam. And he has perhaps the most difficult task today. Data tends to highlight problems, not point to clear-cut answers. We don't expect Adam, of course, to have all the answers, but I'm sure his comments will help us move from a discussion of general trends to practical implications. Finally, we will have about 15 minutes for questions and answers. Those in attendance are welcome to write a question on the provided note cards throughout the discussion and pass those on to Kelly, who will be roaming around, or to Julia, who's sitting at the front here with us. For those of you who are viewing online, you can add questions to the chat box, and Julia will be monitoring those as well. Again, many thanks for joining us today for this important discussion about global trends and challenges for protecting and promoting freedom of religion or belief for all. Great, thank you so much, Paul Asha, for setting our framing today. It's an honor to be with you here at USIP. Thank you for those joining in person and those joining online. To discuss our recent special report, Global Trends and Challenges to Protecting and Promoting Freedom of Religion or Belief. We'll use that acronym of FORB throughout the discussion if you're unfamiliar with that. So at the start, let me just add my appreciation to our speakers today. We couldn't have completed the analysis that we summarized in the report without the publicly available data from the Religion and State Dataset Project and the Pew Research Center. In USAID's support, it's great to see many of you here today, not only got the project off the ground, but sustained us through all the challenges of the pandemic. And that was all the more important given the nefarious effects the pandemic has had on levels of FORB around the world. So today we hope to be part of this broader conversation about how to respond to FORB violations. There's no easy solution, as we know, to curbing the continued global rise in FORB violations. So if you take one thing from today's event, I hope it's that there's a pressing need to, as Paul Asha mentioned, critically reflect on the prominent policies and practices currently aimed at protecting and promoting FORB. The need is driven not due to some fundamental flaw in those policies or programs, but rather what we hope to highlight today, the complex and multifaceted dimensions of religious restrictions and repression. Our special report seeks to bring some of that complexity into focus while also pointing to constructive paths moving forward. And we, of course, couldn't capture everything in the report. Instead, we chose to focus on three key conventional wisdoms that often dominate policy and programming discussions. Those include the connection between FORB on the one hand and on the other hand, political systems or regime type, conflicted instability and economic development. For the first two factors, our findings, which I'll discuss in a moment, generally support conventional wisdom while also adding nuance. But when it comes to economic development, our findings challenge current thinking and also point to new areas to think about. So with that preview and a bit of a teaser, let me take a step back and give a broad overview of our special report. I'll do that in three parts. Talk briefly about what we did, then about what we found, and then a brief reflection on what comes next. As I also have an appointment as an assistant professor, stop me if this becomes too much like a lecture and not what's meant to be provoking conversation. So with that, what did we do? Well, our aim was pretty ambitious. We wanted to explore the correlational relationship between freedom of religion or belief, political stability, peace and development. Before I go into how we did that, let me very briefly say what we did not do. What we didn't do was conduct a causal analysis, and we don't make causal claims in the report. Instead, we focus on observational data to explore associations and relationships. And that perspective is important when both looking at our findings and thinking about the implications for policy and programming. General trends help direct our focus, but they don't point to ready-made solutions. So what exactly did we do? So, as I've mentioned, we explored this correlational relationship, and we did that in two parts. We conducted a quantitative cross-national analysis that looked at data for 176 countries over a 25-year time period, 1990 to 2014. For each country, we included different measures of four violations, regime type, indicators of conflict and peace, and economic development. Because our interest was exploring these general trends that hold across different types of data and different contexts in different time periods. Data on four violations come from three popular data sets, two of which you'll hear more about today. The religion and state data set housed at Bar-Lan University. The global restrictions on religion data set managed by the Pew Research Center. And the varieties of democracy data set housed at the University of Gothenburg. Now, it's useful to note what these data sets actually measure, which isn't freedom of religion or belief, but rather violations of freedom of religion or belief. And I have a definition here that sort of summarizes how we thought about that. That these are restrictions on individuals or communities' ability to adhere to and practice their faith or belief system, or to hold no faith at all. It's important to think about, or thinking about the data in these terms also reminds us that no country can boast that it has complete freedom of religion or belief. We also consider two main pathways through which repression happens, either by government, top-down, or bottom-up through societal hostilities. Now, the quantitative analysis includes both descriptive and inferential statistics. I'm going to focus on the interests of time and hopefully interest on the descriptive side. But all I'll say is everything I show you holds up when looking at this in inferential statistical terms. Now, the quantitative analysis is just a starting point, not an end. To look more specifically at how the observed trends play out in specific contexts, we conducted five in-depth country case studies. And for each, we partnered with local research teams to conduct key informant and focus group interviews that involve government and non-governmental representatives and faith leaders and community members from majority and minority religions. Here on this map, you can see the five country case studies that we looked at. Venezuela, Sudan, South Sudan, Uzbekistan, and Sri Lanka. And we chose those both to look for geographic diversity, but also because they represented different levels of Ford violations. Wish I had the time to get into all the details of these rich case studies, but today, again, I'm going to provide a quick overview of some of the broad trends, but happy to pick up questions about the particular cases during the Q&A. So that's what we did, hopefully that's clear. Here's what we found, at least again in very brief form. So let me start with this relationship between freedom of religion or belief in democracy. It's often argued they go hand in hand, right? And that's largely what we did find. Across different measures and time periods, we found this positive and significant correlation between form and democracy. And again, this is probably unsurprising, given it's often argued that religious freedom is a core component of liberal democracy. The figure on the right, which is also featured in the special report, helps to try to illustrate what we found. There, we've plotted out the values in the Pew data set for government regulation of religion and social hostilities involving religion for all 176 countries in the data set. So each dot in that figure represents a particular point for a country. And we mapped that on to then the polity data set for different regime types, democracy, hybrid regimes, and autocracies. And you can see, I guess, what's on your right under the democracy column that average levels of four violations are lowest in democracies. Again, nothing that surprising. But I want to mention two points of caution that we highlight in the report. First, levels of freedom of religion or belief in democracies very substantially. That's why we created a figure like that. You can see that there are actually some blue dots all the way at the top there. And those represent democracies that have four violations on par with some autocracies. And that should be concerning to us. The gold dots are the distribution of social hostilities involving religion. And there you can see there's relatively minor difference between democracies, hybrid governments, and autocracies. A second reason to remain guarded about the role of Forbes in strengthening democracy or vice versa is the substantial democratic backsliding we've been witnessing over the past few years. As with other human rights, eight on four violations suggest that some of the largest increases in religious restrictions over the past few years have been in Western democracies, especially in Europe. I'm sure if you're tuning in, you're familiar with, for example, bands for people wearing religious symbols or religious clothing in certain European countries or cities. Not to mention an alarming rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia both in Europe and North America. So that's our relationship on Forbes. Our case study of Sri Lanka underscores also how democratic backsliding can pose additional challenges. Long before the events of what have been happening recently, respondents were already expressing concern about tensions between majority and minority religious communities. And I'm sure we're all now waiting to see what the next phase for the country will tell. Quite concerned. So another, moving forward, another oft-cited association with Forbes is political stability and peace. A conventional view is that religious restrictions and hostilities create grievances which leads to violence. And here, too, the data generally support, well, that expectation. On this slide, again, you can see a figure that's also in the report, which you can look at in more detail, which shows the breakdown of levels of Forbes violations in countries that experienced civil wars in 2014. And here the key takeaway is that a much larger proportion of countries with high levels of Forbes violations, especially social hostilities, also experienced civil war. And while that generally meets our expectations, I'll just highlight two additional patterns for specific types of Forbes violations that might be useful for thinking about in terms of policy and programming. First, government regulations of religion are particularly likely to increase after civil wars in which combatants fight for a religious cause. And this is something I've shown not just in this special report, but in other work with Dr. Peter Henney of the University of Vermont, where we found that governments tend to restrict religions after religious civil wars and not just the religions that rise up, but all religions within that country. And second, social hostilities towards religious minorities are especially likely to increase during political transitions, something that should worry us again about some of the case studies we looked at like Sudan and Sri Lanka. In addition, Paul Washe's opening remarks or tying to that Paul Washe's opening remarks highlighted how apostasy charges may be on the rise since the military coup in Sudan, even though those laws are technically no longer on the books. So finally in the interest of time, let me just briefly say something about perhaps our most surprising finding. And that's that it's often argued Forbes can be good for country level economic development. However, we found no significant correlation between Forbes and country level economic development. If anything, global trends suggest the opposite. Again, here's a figure from the special report that you can see in more detail if you look at that report online. The general takeaway here is what that's showing is general increase in GDP across the different regions of the world, as well as an increase in Forbes violations, both government restrictions and social hostilities. The disturbing observation is that all three have increased over time, GDP, government regulation of religion and social hostilities. Now, our main point here is not to say we should completely dismiss the link between Forbes and development. Rather, we need to redirect our focus. In particular, our case studies suggest the value of looking at the grassroots level and how perceptions of economic disparity can exacerbate tensions between religious communities. I'm happy to elaborate that in Q&A, but let me now just move towards our policy recommendations. So, from everything that we've looked at, these global trends suggest at least three areas to redirect our attention. First, there's a pressing need to more effectively integrate policies and programming that promote Forbes and to broader democracy promotion and human rights efforts. The concurrent decline in other human rights and democracy in recent years underscores that Forbes cannot be protected and promoted in isolation. It needs to be integrated into these broader frameworks. It also requires dialogue and coordination among a broader set of advocates of Forbes and human rights at the global, national and local levels. And for more of what that might entail, I'd recommend a recent USIP commentary by my colleagues Peter Mandeville and Knox Tames. A holistic approach also provides the opportunity to broaden the voices with which we engage. Many discussions about religious freedom focus on majority and traditional religious communities in a country, but Forbes applies to all religious and belief groups. It extends to atheists in Bangladesh who've been arrested. It also applies to circumstances where religious identities intersect with attributes such as race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. So with that in mind, there's a second pressing need, which is to develop context specific and locally owned policies and practices that promote Forbes. Forbes has complex causes and consequences that may not operate in the same and all environments. Policies and programs aimed at advancing Forbes and other human rights needs to take these local realities into account. That's a common refrain we all hear now, but what that actually looks in practice requires future discussion. And finally, I hope our report shows the value and need for more evidence-based approaches to supporting Forbes. More than two decades of international efforts to promote accountability for violations of religious freedom have prevented a sharper decline than otherwise would have occurred. However, additional tools are now needed to curb the continued rise in religious restrictions violations around the world. So in conclusion, our special report raises important questions about how to scale up the international community's efforts to protect Forbes. Most importantly, we stress the need for more understanding of when and where freedom of religion or belief is most likely to impact peace and development. The extent to which we as practitioners, policymakers and citizens of the international community continue to critically reflect on policies and practices aimed at protecting and promoting Forbes may very well determine the degree to which millions of people around the world are free to practice their faith or choose no faith at all. So with that, let me thank you for listening to our overview of the report. And I'd like us now to turn to a pre-recorded message by Professor Jonathan Fox who will say more about the value of evidence-based approaches to supporting Forbes. Thank you for inviting me to participate in this conference. I've been asked to talk about why are evidence-based cross-national projects important, and I'm going to have a few points about that. The first is using evidence-based cross-national data can authoritatively identify important trends. It's important to see what directions things are going. Are they going up? Are they going down? Are they steady? And one of the classic trends that's been found across pretty much everybody who's measuring anything like religious freedom, discrimination against religious minorities, general restrictions on the majority religion, all of those things, everybody who's measuring it is finding that it's been consistently rising over time. And this is the exact opposite of what we would obviously like to happen. And this is not a finding that's restricted to single-world religion or single-world region. This is a very consistent rise over space, over time, across religious traditions, across global regions. This is not being driven by a few bad actors. This is something that's going on very much across the board. Generally, it does go down in some countries, but for every country in which these things drop, there's two or three words increasing. So this is a very strong trend over time. A second useful aspect of cross-national data is it can disprove common but erroneous assumptions. For example, Western democracies are assumed to be bastions of liberalism and religious freedom. I'm not going to address the liberalism part, but religious freedom, Western democracies are not the most religious free region in the world. There's actually a significant amount of regulation of religion and both societal and governmental restrictions on religious freedoms, especially of religious minorities. In fact, if you want to find the most religious free region in the world, what I found in my own data is it's Christian majority countries in the global south. There are a number of reasons for that that are beyond the scope of what I could discuss this day. But if you look at Christian majority countries in the global south, on average, there are exceptions to every general statement when you're discussing religious freedom. But on average, a global south Christian majority country is going to be more free than your average Western democracy. And it doesn't seem to matter whether these global south Christian majority countries are democracies or not. So democracy doesn't seem to be a factor at least as far as a global south is concerned. It probably is, but we're talking when you measure things in a multivariate analysis, but when you're just looking at actual averages, it doesn't seem to make a difference. And while we're at it, separation of religion and state is also far more common in these global south Christian majority countries than in Western democracies. A third reason that using empirical and using cross national data is important is you can analyze this data using causal techniques to identify phenomena that undermine religious freedom. The most important one that I found is ideology. Ideology of any kind seems to be bad for religious freedom and it doesn't matter whether the ideology is secular or religious. It still undermines religious freedom. There are a lot of examples of religious restrictions on religious freedom in the West, for example, that are very much motivated, at least in part by secular ideologies, in particular restrictions on women's head coverings, restrictions on kosher and Halal slaughter, and restrictions on infant circumcision, which is a prominent aspect of both the Jewish and Muslim traditions. And I found that true believers and secular ideologies are no more tolerant of those who do not adhere to their ideologies than the most zealous of religious believers. Some of the findings can be a bit surprising. You wouldn't expect them. One of the most interesting findings I found in my most recent book, Why Do People Discriminate Against Jews, is not the conspiracy theories of Jewish power are correlated with discrimination against Jews. Nobody would be particularly surprised by that, but the level of belief in these conspiracy theories about Jews actually predicts discrimination against religious minorities other than Jews in these countries, almost as well as a predicts discrimination against Jews. And this is a sign that anti-Semitism is a sign of a much larger malaise within society that causes a lot of problems for a lot of people, not just Jews. Sometimes you can find things that are the opposite of what many assume. One of the most interesting findings I found is that in Christian majority countries, the more religious a population, countries with more religious people are less likely to have high levels of societal discrimination against Jews and Muslims. This is a very interesting finding and I think it has something to do with the fact that religious Christians are very worried about the challenges of secularism and they're looking for allies in fighting what they believe is a threat. And they're finding those allies, or they're seeking to find those allies among other members of the Abrahamic religion. Religions. The final point I would like to make about empirical data or cross-national empirical data is good policy needs to be made based on accurate information, not common wisdom and assumptions. Going back to the democracy things. Democracy does not guarantee religious freedom. Non-ideological governments and forms of separation of religion state that are not hostile to religion are a much better guarantee of religious freedom. If you run all the numbers and control for many other factors, yes democracy does reduce levels of religious discrimination against minorities and increases religious freedom, but there's so many other factors that are far more influential. So democracy is not a silver bullet. It does not in and of itself guarantee religious freedom. The second thing is that ideas count. What people think and what people say makes a big difference. This includes conspiracy theories about religious minorities, portraying minorities as non-indigenous, portraying minorities as a security threat or a political threat. When these things happen, these things matter and they undermine religious freedom. And I think they're far more important than levels of democracy. I'd also like to point out that data does show the West does not have a very good record for religious freedom. It's better than many countries, but not nearly as good as it ought to be. So if the West wants to promote religious freedom, it needs to get its own house in order. Thank you all very much for your time. I hope you found this brief talk useful. And we'll send our thanks to Professor Fox for perhaps making a few provocative claims for us to discuss during the question and answer. It also shows that looking at these data can continually raise questions and as Jonathan mentioned, maybe undermine or challenge certain views that we have, which we tried to do in the special report. We're now fortunate to have the Pew Research Center's Samira Mujumdar join us virtually. And she'll tell us a little bit more, as I mentioned, our report could only look at data up to 2014 or 2016. And Samir has more information on us with the most recent round of data collection from Pew might tell us. Thank you very much, Samir. Thank you, Jason. I'm just going to put my slides up and then I will get started. Are my slides coming up? Not yet, but I think our team will be able to help. Thank you, Jason. Good morning, everybody. My name is Samir Mujumdar, and I'm a research associate at Pew Research Center focusing on global restrictions on religion. I'd like to thank USIP for inviting me to speak today. In my remarks today, I'll be covering the ways in which governments and societies restrict religion with a particular focus on trends we see in our data, which we started collecting since 2007, and it covers 198 territories and countries. I will also touch on some data on regime types and how they relate to restrictions on religion. To start, let me just say a few words about Pew Research Center. We're a nonprofit, nonpartisan, and nonadvocacy social science research organization. And what nonadvocacy means for us is that we don't attach policy recommendations to our research. We're primarily funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, and for this project, we receive additional funding from the John Templeton Foundation. The data I'll be presenting today comes from our global restrictions on religion project. We conduct the study annually to measure the ways in which governments and societies curtail religious beliefs and practices, and we collect and categorize this data from a set of documents and databases from well-established sources. To just give a brief overview of how we collect our data, we use more than a dozen primary and secondary sources, most of which are published annually that are up here on this list. We try to use the same list of sources each year to ensure a consistent methodology, and we come through these sources for specific policies and actions and sort the information into two buckets. One category is government restrictions, which includes official laws, policies, and actions carried out by government actors that impinge on religious beliefs and practices. And the other category is social hostilities, which are religion-related hostilities by private individuals, organizations, or groups. So we've conducted this line of research for more than 10 years now, and when looking at the big picture, we have a few trends that we have noticed. Government restrictions, which is on the chart on the left, are on the rise globally and are at peak levels for the study. More countries are experiencing higher levels of religious restrictions today than in 2007 when we began studying this topic. Social hostilities, on the other hand, which is on the chart on the right, have risen since 2007, but with more fluctuations throughout the years. It's also important to note the rise in religious restrictions hasn't affected all regions of the world in the same way. Some regions have seen small changes while other regions have seen much more notable ones. As you can see here, the Middle East and North Africa region has had the highest levels of government restrictions throughout the course of the study, and the Americas has had the lowest levels, but the region has seen increases since 2007. When it comes to social hostilities, you can see that there have been more fluctuations through the years across each region. And here again, the Middle East and North Africa region has had the highest levels of hostilities, but they've been declining in recent years. It's somewhat totally surprising to see fluctuations in social hostilities and less so in government restrictions, since government restrictions include laws and policies which tend to stay more steady from year to year than incidents or attacks carried out by groups or individuals, which are captured more fully in the social hostilities index. We break up our government restrictions and social hostilities indices into four further categories to see more specific trends in the data. So the four government restrictions categories we've looked at include government favoritism of religious groups, general laws and policies, restricting religious freedom, harassment of religious groups by governments, and we also look at limits on religious activities such as restrictions on religious stress that has been mentioned earlier on this panel, and this also includes government interference in portion. So all of these government restrictions categories have experienced increases in the decade of data that we have with limits on religious activity actually rising more steeply over the last decade than the other categories. Now turning to social hostilities, we also break this up into four further categories. We look at interreligious tension and violence, which are acts of sectarian and communal violence between religious groups. We also look at individual and social group harassment, and this is a broad category that ranges from actions of individuals to mob violence that target religious groups. We also look at religious violence by organized groups, which includes actions of religion related terrorist groups. And finally, we also look at hostilities related to religious norms, which can include hostilities over religious conversions or harassment towards women for violating religious or secular dress norms. So this category of hostilities over religious norms has actually experienced the most notable increases compared to the other categories over the decade of data that we have collected. I'm going to shift gears a bit to another analysis we did in 2020 on regime types and restrictions on religion. We analyze our data on religious restrictions and combined it with data on regime classifications published in a democracy index by the economist intelligence unit, which is a different democracy index than the one used by the USIP report. We did this to discern whether there is a link between different models of government and levels of restrictions on religion, and we did find a strong association between authoritarianism and government restrictions on religion. So roughly two thirds of countries with very high government restrictions are classified as authoritarian. Some examples of these types of countries include Myanmar, Russia and China, which all have higher very high government restrictions and are also classified as authoritarian on this democracy index. Meanwhile, only 7% of countries with low government restrictions are authoritarian. You'll also see on this chart that no country that was classified as a full democracy had very high government restrictions. We also analyze social hostilities on regime types, but the picture is more mixed here. One thing to point out here is that there are many authoritarian countries with low or moderate levels of social hostilities involving religion, suggesting that in some cases a government may restrict religion through laws and actions by state authorities while limiting religious hostilities among its citizens. One notable example of this that we see in our data set is China where it has consistently had very high levels of government restrictions on religion, but over the years social hostilities have varied between moderate and low levels. This actually brings me to the end of my prepared remarks. All of this is on Pew Research Center's website on pewresearch.org, and if you have further detailed questions about this data, my contact information is up here as well. Jason, back to you. Thank you, Samira. And yes, it's in a way unfortunate that as we look at the data up to 2019, we see that the problem only is exacerbated. And of course, data tend to highlight the problems, not the answers, so we appreciate all the more that Adam, you're here to join us. Just talk a little bit about them, maybe the implications for policy and programming. And I think if you would like to use the podium that we are able to accommodate that. Good morning. It's really great to be here and congratulations on this groundbreaking report. I'm really glad that we were able to work with you all on this and to see it to the light of day. Adam Phillips, USAID, local faith and transformative partnerships. I direct the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the United States Agency for International Development. I really want to thank USIP for hosting this event today on the release of a new USIP report, Global Trends and Challenges to Protecting and Promoting Freedom of Religion or Belief, which summarizes the key findings of the Closing the Gap Study, which USAID's Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships was pleased to support. I want to extend special thanks to USIP's Religion and Inclusive Societies Program and report authors Jason Klosek and Scott Bledsoe for their tremendous effort on this two-year project exploring the relationships between freedom of religion or belief, peace and development to help institutions like USAID chart evidence-based policy and practice. These past 18 months since I came into service in government at USAID here in the Biden-Harris administration, I've had the honor to work with civil society leaders, government ministerial counterparts on the intersection of freedom of religion or belief, or as we might say in the States, IRF, International Religious Freedom, and the intersection of strategic religious engagement or how do faith-based communities, local partners work on the issues of our day when we think about all the challenges we face, things like COVID, HIV, AIDS, democracy, on and on and on. It's been an honor to co-lead our agency's localization efforts on that front. We think about our work in the Northern Triangle in Central America. We think about addressing the root causes of migration there. We think about advancing efforts around climate resilience and food security, and we're mindful of Putin's war in Ukraine that has caused a horrific spillover effect in places like the Horn of Africa and throughout the Sahel. Places that demonstrate that we live in an integrated world with great need. As Ambassador Large for Religious Freedom Rashad Hussein noted last month in his remarks at the International Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief, he said this, it's critical that we not view the topic of international religious freedom in a silo and that we don't deal with it as a distinct set of issues. It has to be comprehensively integrated into what we are doing as government, as civil society, as multilateral institutions. At USAID we're pleased to celebrate the release of the closing the GAP report because it supports and moves us towards what Ambassador Hussein notes as essential, a multi-sectoral and multilateral approach to international religious freedom that is integrated with broader efforts to promote democracy and secure human rights for all people. The findings and recommendations of this research come at a very, very, very critical moment. As we confront multiple global crises, including democratic backsliding around the world, it's more important than ever that we recognize as the report notes that religious freedom and or belief must not be treated as an isolated topic. Instead, its protection and promotion, truly its integration in our partnerships around these global challenges, must be part of a solution. At the center of these efforts to secure and advance democracy and human rights must be what USAID Administrator Samantha Power calls a revolution of dignity. When people are free, which includes freedom to express our religious beliefs in private and in public, democracy is strengthened. We also know that when it comes to religious freedom, context matters. At USAID's center, we work every day with local actors, including faith-based and community leaders and organizations, who have the local knowledge, expertise and trust that promoting religious freedom and human rights requires. We're very encouraged by this report's attention to this need for context-specific and locally-owned efforts. Perhaps most importantly, we are prepared to introduce the agency's first-of-its-kind and truly USG's, US government's first-of-its-kind policy on what you might call strategic religious engagement, which will build upon USAID's efforts to strengthen the evidence-based and religious engagement in development and improve our ability to engage with faith-based and religious community groups. This report will be an essential resource to provide the necessary evidence and support of engaging local religious communities and promoting FORB in all development and humanitarian assistance programs. Effective strategic religious engagement requires a baseline of freedom of religion or belief. The trends that we're here discussing today arise in government-imposed religious restrictions coupled with increased discrimination and hostilities present a call to action for all those committed to promoting FORB for all people. USAID has a variety of tools and resources it uses to promote international religious freedom, and this includes required training on religious freedom for all foreign service officers. This report's urgent, evidence-based findings will serve as a strong complement to USAID's efforts to ensure that all people are free to practice their deeply held beliefs. Now, Paolo Wachar said that I would maybe have a couple answers. I don't have all the answers by any stretch. But I do want to underscore and illumine just two fine points on these general trends to yield maybe to some practical implications. First of all, promoting freedom of religion or belief, promoting international religious freedom, is a bipartisan, steadfast, quintessentially American commitment, you could say. And this office demonstrates that. The previous administration started working with USIP on this report, and the Biden-Harris administration carried it forward to the light of day. So our commitment to this issue is unwavering, steadfast and true. Now, I think after the four ministerial in London, the UK ministerial on freedom of religion or belief, we also broaden the aperture of why this matters. We see that in Europe, in the global south, in Asia, in the Middle East, that when we promote the freedom of religion or belief, this also promotes living out one's faith or belief in action. And we need much more of that. When we think about COVID, malaria, HIV, AIDS, peace and security, democracy and elections, you could say achieving the SDGs, when we promote the freedom of religion or belief, we promote the practice of one's beliefs in the public square and in the last mile, you could say. So that's what we're trying to do at USAID and integrating these into our policy framework, into our strategy. And I think that we could say that if one is free to practice their faith, which as we know even is seen, exhibited in the public square or last miles we may never see, we'll see that these are true partners when it comes to seeking the common good in midst all these common crises we share. So again, it's been great to be with you all today and I know we have a little time for questions and I'm excited to lean in there. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Adam. As you point out, it's not an easy road ahead but by hopefully pursuing some of the recommendations highlighted in the report and working together in collaboration, there are working towards the common good in that way. And we have questions that have been coming in. As a reminder, if you're in person, you're welcome to write down a question on no card and pass it to the left. I think many have done that. If you're online, you're welcome to post some questions. As we turn to those questions, I'll also just highlight the partnerships as well. So for ongoing work at USIP, one project includes the IRF Working Group that Mawasha mentioned at the start of our event today and the other is a forthcoming evidence review on strategic religious engagement coming out of USIP that highlights both the evidence, the knowledge base we have, but also ways in which we might build on that to think more about when and where strategic religious engagement could be most effective. So I'm very excited about the path forward. Let's look at some of the questions as they come in now. A few have to do with the data, so I think Adam will answer those questions. No. So one of the questions here, our first question is that because so much of the study that the Special Report is based on focuses on publicly available data sets was a question about sort of what makes these data sets accurate and objective and whether or not we considered other sources and which sources did we not consider. So I'll try to discuss that just very briefly. If you ask that question in person, please come and chat with me more afterwards as well. Putting on the academic hat for a moment, I just say never trust data. In the sense that data always has history. We need to think about what are the sources behind the data and the data set, what is available and what is not available. In the very summary term I say the data sets we use were specifically because they are so careful about those limitations. The religion and state database, the Pew Research Center's data set, the Variety's Democracy data set acknowledge both what they do and can't do. And so we take some hope in that. The other thing is that we spent a great deal of time compiling a data set that looked at different data points because there are limitations in the way in which data is collected across those data sets. So we tried to triangulate in a sense the limitations of the data. It's also why I would say we'd be excited to speak more about the country case studies. But the data sets are really only scratching the surface of what's happening. And it's really when you get into the context that we can understand better what's happening on the ground. So hopefully that gets a little bit at that question. Again, the way in which we conducted the research we tried to be as systematic and rigorous as possible to take into consideration the limitations of data. And also we've been tried to be modest in how we've described our findings. That it's correlational, not causal. So I'll leave it there in the interest of time. We have a few other questions. Maybe we can switch towards the policy side for a moment. A very straightforward one. Adam, where can we find the new USAID policy on form? So the USAID policy is currently titled Bridges. And it's integrating two very often siloed places of policymaking, religious freedom and religious engagement. We're trying to bring those together, not just with the idea of bridges, but to bridge how U.S. government can partner with local faith-based communities of belief and practice. We have a cross-agency, cross-sectoral team that has been writing on it, poking holes at it, doing all of the internal work. And we're about to set that out for public comments. So that'll be available. If you subscribe to our newsletter, you'll be able to find it there. If you follow us on social media, USAID connects, you could find it there. It'll be out in, you know, let's say early fall for public comment. I know we're all excited to see it, so look forward to it. So we have a few other questions as they're coming in. Perhaps one, Samiri, I think is still with us. On the Pew data set, the global religious restrictions data set, there was a slide that showed that reduction of hostilities in one particular area, which is coming in, which was interreligious tension and interfaith. So Samiri, I wonder if you could just briefly in a minute or so just shed light on that about how that was found or if there's any idea about why that might be, and that when it comes to social hostilities, there was a reduction in interreligious tension or interfaith tension. Let's see if Samiri- Sure. Yeah. So that was the only category that we saw a reduction in in the decade of data that we analyzed. The straight answer for this might not be a satisfying. When reductions in any of these categories occur, it's difficult for us to pinpoint what exactly these are related to or if there is an origin point. So interreligious tensions and communal violence, these occur between communities and sometimes they have spillover effects that can carry over from year to year, which can cause them to appear on our index. But over time, if those hostilities do decrease or if there's reported, there are fewer reports of hostilities between groups, that's when it appears on our trend lines that they've been decreasing. So unfortunately, it's hard to pinpoint specific events, sometimes when these general trends occur, but I can pinpoint to a very specific reduction we saw in a separate category when we looked at year to year changes for our 2019 data, which is our latest data set. We actually saw a five year decline in religion related terrorism activities on our index and that was attributed to actions that occurred in 2014. So in 2014, there was actually a peak in religion related terrorism with actions by ISIS in Iraq and Syria really peaking then. And then we saw a decline by the time 2019 came around and one of the events we were able to attribute that reduction to was the global coalition against ISIS claim that they defeated ISIS and they lost a huge swath of territory in that year. So we were able to pinpoint that decline in the trend line to these specific events. But when broader reductions happen, when we're looking at broader categories, which include several different measures that we're looking at, it's difficult to pinpoint some very specific things that may have led to some of these declines. But Jason, I don't know if you've noticed anything in your data set when reductions have occurred. No, that's great, Samir. Thank you. And also, in the interest of time, we have time for one last question. I think it'll relate to what you're saying and pick up on this relationship with Forbes and terrorism. Just highlight that when we think about these data sets, another thing we haven't really talked about today is they are composite variables. There are dozens of Samir's presentation highlighted, lots of factors that are observed and then pulled together for the religious freedom score. So if any of you are interested in this type of research, look at the publicly available data sets and you can see all these different trends for different types of Ford violations. So speaking lastly then on this idea of is there a correlation or what might the correlation between Ford and terrorism or extremism? I'll just briefly say there's a scholarly field that looks at this and has found, again, a correlational analysis that where you have more freedom of religion or belief, you have less likely to see terrorist attacks. And the logic underlying that is that when you have repression, you have grievances which lead to violence. In our report we looked at civil war primarily as a conflict indicator, but it is important to think about other types of violence. It also has policy implications, programmatic implications. So Adam, I don't know if it's helpful to close with thoughts then on this relationship between Ford and how we continue to think about the threat of terrorism. I think this question really gets back and it's a good one to end on, gets back to the implications of the study which really calls for this call to action to have an integrative approach to all of our policymaking efforts. And so when you think about the correlation between freedom of religion or belief or religious freedom and violence or extremism in the world, I think for the last 20 years we've thought, oh, there are certain places on the planet where this takes place. But I think if 2022 has taught us anything, it has woken us up and taken us back centuries to reimagining and re-questioning why we have left this corollary off the table in our policymaking when we see the Putin's disastrous, deadly invasion of Ukraine, which, as USAIP has published a number of studies on, has tremendous religious implications. So I think it's a new call to think anew and think more globally in an integrative and inclusive way so that we can seek the peace. Great. Thank you so much, Adam. And thank you for everyone who's joined today. I apologize if we didn't have time to get to your question. If you're here in person, I'd invite you to stick around and join us in the atrium. There'll be some coffee, tea, and snacks, and we can continue the conversation there. If you're online, continue to please follow the work that we're doing at USAIP as well as the work at USAID at the Pew Research Center and at the Religion and State data set at Bar-Lan University to reach out to those that were speaking today and we're happy to answer questions. Finally, just say that we hope this adds to the conversation on how to effectively and strategically and with context-specific knowledge, protect and promote freedom of religion or belief around the world. We understand we're in a privileged position to sit here and talk about it. So as we end, perhaps it's just helpful to end in silence and think about those throughout the world whom our work will hopefully affect. Thank you for joining us.