 The world today is a religious place, with 84% of people identifying as practitioners of a faith tradition. Religion shapes societies and individuals in fundamental ways, both when they are at peace and at war. In recent years, violent extremism couched in religious frames and a global rise in religious discrimination have dominated the headlines. Addressing these issues is crucial to building peace. Less told, but just as important for those seeking to build peace, are the stories of how religious actors and ideas can have a profound impact in supporting efforts to build peaceful coexistence and justice worldwide. Sri Lanka suffered from over 30 years of violent conflict rooted in ethnic, religious and class difference. Religious communities have come to view each other with mistrust. But in the midst of all these challenges, the center for peace building and reconciliation with USIP support has built a coalition of male and female religious leaders dedicated to peace and reconciliation. Their work is fueled not only personal, but also social transformations that inspire clergy and their followers to act even more courageously and committedly to peace. In Iraq, the political transition that began in 2003 surfaced many tensions within and between faith communities. Many of those seeking to build peace understood the need to talk about religious identity, but they felt uncertain about how to do so in ways that wouldn't create a violent backlash. USIP worked in partnership with the group of Iraqi facilitators and civil society peace builders throughout the country to develop their capacity and strengthen their confidence in engaging with the religious sector. These facilitators taught peace courses and religious schools, developed the capacity of religious educators to promote tolerance, and directly mediated between religious communities in conflict in Nineveh province. In Nigeria, Pastor James Wuyeh and Imam Mohammed Ashafa served as soldiers in religiously inspired militia groups in their youth. Challenged by their own religious leadership and community members, they soon began to question their commitment to violence. They reconciled with one another and dedicated themselves to non-violence. James and Ashafa founded the Interfaith Mediation Center through which they built Christian-Muslim collaboration for peace. With USIP support, James and Ashafa mediated a local peace accord in Yelwa Shandam, where peace has reigned for over a decade. Given religion's influence on societies and conflict dynamics around the world, it's critical that practitioners and policymakers understand and partner with the religious sector to build peace. For over 25 years, USIP has worked with religious communities to draw from their rich traditions, ideas and values that support peace and that can offer nonviolent paths forward in the midst of conflict. We offer skills to religious actors, both men and women, young and old, from many different faith traditions around the world to strengthen their ability to mediate conflicts, to reduce violence and to promote coexistence. USIP has a vision, a world in which the best of religion helps sustain peace rather than drive prejudice and violence. To get there, understanding the important influence of religion in shaping communities and governments and working within diverse religious communities is crucial. This work, like the work of peace building generally, is not easy, but it's possible because peace is possible. Good morning and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace, which was established in 1984 by Congress as a national nonpartisan public institution dedicated to helping prevent, mitigate and resolve violent conflict abroad. We're very pleased to be convening today's important discussion on international religious freedom and its role in promoting national security and peace building. We're very honored to welcome Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Rashad Hussain. It's very nice to have you back, sir, at the Institute. USIP has recently hosted a broad range of experts to look at the links between religious freedom, peace and development across four continents. Their recommendations for ensuring that international religious freedom remains a central pillar of US national security and diplomacy have been published in a report. We're really honored to have several members of the working group with us here today, and I would like to take a minute to thank them personally for their commitment to this body of work. It's now my distinct pleasure to introduce Ambassador Rashad Hussain, who serves as the Ambassador-at-Large for the Office of International Religious Freedom at the State Department. In this role, the Ambassador serves as the Principal Advisor to the Secretary and Advisor to the President of Religious Freedom, Conditions and Policy. Ambassador Hussain has previously served as Director for Partnerships and Global Engagement at the National Security Council, Senior Council at the Department of Justice's National Security Division, Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Special Envoy for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications and Deputy Associate White House Counsel. Following his remarks, the Ambassador will be joined on stage by two of our experts, Palwasha Kakkar, who is the Director of the Religion and Inclusive Societies Program here at USIP, and Dr. Peter Mandeville, our Senior Advisor on the program. They'll be joining the Ambassador for a conversation that's going to explore a number of the issues that he'll be introducing in his comments and that came up in the report that I just referred to. After that, we hope that you'll join us for a reception with the Ambassador so that we can continue the conversation. Mr. Ambassador, you're very welcome. Good morning. Thank you so much, Lees. It's always inspiring to be in this majestic building, but I'm even more inspired by the mandate of the people that work in this building and inspired by the people that are doing incredible work here, and it's been so beneficial to us and to the country and really to the world to have this partnership with all of you. So thank you for everything that you're doing here. It's great to be with so many friends that are here, live with us in the audience, and to all of those that are following online these days. It seems that we see each other more overseas than we do with our busy schedules right here in Washington, but it really has been an honor to work with you all, and I have such fond memories of doing this work with so many of our colleagues around the world in places from Morocco to Central African Republic to Indonesia. And I'm honored to be here and to deepen and expand our friendship, to expand our partnership with you in advancing all of our international religious freedom work that we're doing. I'd like to thank the U.S. Institute of Peace for its remarkable new report on the intersection of religious freedom and national security and for convening our conversation today. I'm grateful for the government representatives, for the civil society advocates, and for the policy experts that are represented here today. Our collaboration together, our service together, has helped really make an impact in improving people's lives and saving people's lives around the world. And I again want to thank the President of U.S. IP, Lee's Grand. I also want to thank the Director for Religion and Inclusive Societies, Paul Washa Kakkar, Senior Advisor Peter Mandeville, and visiting expert Nox Thames for their invaluable leadership on putting the report together. We're gathered here today on International Religious Freedom Day, and the subject of our conversation, the intersection of international religious freedom and national security and peace building, has been central to all of my work as a public servant for many years in the government. And it's also long provided a foundation for the work of our office. International Religious Freedom Policy can at times appear to exist in its own world, with its own distinct advocacy and policy communities, and its own set of policymakers. But it shouldn't. And in fact, it doesn't. Our work engages the breadth of U.S. foreign policy and national security policy every day. And increasingly, we are making an impact with this work, and we are making our impact clear to our colleagues across the policy world. This morning, I had a chance to meet with leading civil society activists, actors, and academics. And we talked about the importance of the work that's being done to fully integrate now the work of protecting human rights, and specifically international religious freedom, into the broader policy apparatus. And I think that we've made significant progress in this area, and our efforts have never been more integrated than they are today. I'd like to invite you to take a look at Knox and Peters' new USIP report, Maintaining International Religious Freedom as a Central Tenant of U.S. National Security, which describes some of this important work. The work we are doing together cuts across so many areas and is now, as I mentioned, integrated into so many portfolios across our government. Over the years, I've said that often the most important work being done to advance religious freedom and engage religious actors is not being explicitly executed in the name of religious freedom or religious engagement per se, and that dynamic is a really important sign of progress. Engagement on religious freedom and with religious actors has been an important part of my own previous work in the government, including my time as Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. As Ambassador-at-Large, I'm now charged with the mission of advising President Biden, Secretary Blinken, and other senior administration officials on challenges to freedom of religion or belief, how these challenges shape or impact our national security and foreign policy, and how we can address these challenges together. The mission of our team, as stated in our strategy, is to strengthen U.S. national security by enabling more inclusive, equitable, and rights-respecting societies and institutions around the world through our religious freedom work. Everything that we do in our office is in service of that goal. We regularly engage with civil society, with diaspora communities, with leaders in our government and in foreign governments, and with multilateral institutions. We seek to shape a foreign policy that protects U.S. interests and security by engaging faith communities and promoting and protecting the important human rights of freedom of religion or belief. We address laws and policies that impact religious freedom around the world, and we document religious freedom violations and abuses in our annual report, which we provide to Congress every year. We recommend designations of the worst offenders, as countries of particular concerns or countries for our special watch list, and we work on, importantly, individual cases of repression. We train foreign and civil service officers, and throughout this work, we are focused on the most complicated issues at the crossroads of religious freedom and national security. We are constantly assessing how we can strategically engage religious actors to advance our foreign policy objectives. Protecting human rights, including religious freedom, is essential to protecting national security. In all of my years of service, I've grown more certain of this truth, that the absence of religious freedom weakens social cohesion and alienates citizens from their governments. It also foments inequality, resentment, and unrest. In fact, research demonstrates that governments which stifle religious freedom and crack down on religious practice, expression, and identity, foster violence and instability. The same findings apply to governments which tolerate such violations of this human right. As President Biden's National Security Strategy notes, this dynamic is more relevant today than ever. Our non-democratic competitors often fail to protect human rights, and too often, sometimes in horrific ways, make violations of religious freedom a key weapon in protecting their own power and projecting their power transnationally. The President's strategy further notes that these autocrats are working overtime to undermine democracy and export a model of governance marked by repression at home and coercion abroad. They mistakenly believe democracy is weaker than autocracy because they fail to understand that a nation's power springs from its own people. But, as he writes, the United States is strong because our democracy, and I would say democracy generally, enables us to continually reimagine ourselves and renew our strength. And that's exactly why we do this work, why we defend democracy, why we defend human rights, and religious freedom all over the world. So that as President Biden writes, we can better live up to the idea of America enshrined in our founding documents. I've seen firsthand the broad social and political effects of restricting an individual's right to religious freedom, how religion is weaponized, and how social and political inclusion is blocked, how the hope for peace and stability can wither away as oppression rises and resentment builds. I've also seen how progress is made. In my years in public service, I've worked in close partnership with civil society and governments around the world to build bridges among religions, communities, and governments. Such efforts have decreased tensions, increased communal cohesion, and brought a measure of stability to some of the most unstable places in the world. As a country, as a government, as a community of foreign policy and national security practitioners, we face difficult challenges around the globe today. Our democratic values are being challenged by autocratic alternatives, communal violence, and kleptocracy. Violations of freedom of religion or belief continue to mount around the world. This trend is particularly troubling because religion and religious actors play an increasingly important role in advancing important foreign policy objectives and driving change. The national security strategy, which I mentioned earlier, identifies human rights as a core element of national security and calls for an inclusive approach to policy engagement. Working with religious communities and other civil societies will be critical in advancing the strategy's emphasis on holding states accountable for violations and abuses of human rights, including against ethnic and religious minorities. I am encouraged by the growing body of people, by the governments, and civil society who are stepping up to do this work. And I'm particularly encouraged to see the increasing number of policymakers, academics, and civil society leaders who are coming together as we are here to better understand international religious freedom and religious actor engagement in foreign policy and the significant implications for U.S. national security. I am also encouraged by the dedication of our diplomatic partners in the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, or IRFBA, which is now an alliance of 42 countries pulling together and working on some of the most persistent issues in religious freedom policy. These allies and partners are essential to supporting the advancement of religious freedom all around the world. In my closing time, I'd like to outline a few areas in which religious freedom advocacy and religious actor engagement are necessary to protect security and advance our foreign policy interests. First, advancing religious freedom and engaging religious actors is critical to addressing violence and to building peace. Religious actors have proven to be effective allies in countering communal violence, terrorism, mass atrocities, and the deliberate mobilization to violence against entire communities. Across the globe, governments and non-state actors use religious identity, perceptions of threat, and age-old narratives of grievance to mobilize one population against another or to justify oppression. For example, accusations of blasphemy or defamation can be used to justify violence and oppression in some countries around the world. These laws prohibit or restrict the expression of practice of faith, enable governments to suppress peaceful dissent and silence the voices of religious minorities and empower individuals to attack those whose religion or ethnicity differs from their own. Such policies directly impact the stability of countries and regions important to United States national security interests. Second, our engagement with governments and civil society is necessary to address the increasingly dangerous use of technology in repressing communities around the world. While violence isn't new, it is happening faster and it is happening with greater intensity. Why is this the case? In part because of rapidly developing technologies and digital authoritarianism, often two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, social media can mobilize large numbers of people at the click of a button, but on the other, new technologies give governments extraordinary control over people's lives through artificial intelligence and facial recognition, new tools of surveillance and control. Our teams work closely with the new cyber bureau at the State Department and many other offices to ensure that bilateral policy discussions emphasize the damaging effects of new tech and digital authoritarianism and that we take steps in all of our strategies and we make plans to mitigate and prevent more harm from occurring. Third, protecting religious freedom and engaging with religious leaders is necessary to address some of our most pressing interrelated global challenges, climate change, disease, mass migration and food insecurity. Societies and governments under such pressures sometimes scapegoat the others in desperation, including religious minorities. Yet religious communities have proven to be some of the most critical and effective actors in addressing these challenges, although their resources and voices are routinely underutilized. Our strategic religious engagement unit, born of the State Department's previous Religion and Global Affairs Office, is dedicated to working with members of religious communities to advance a range of foreign policy objectives most recently and most visibly addressing vaccine hesitancy and climate change. We seek to ensure that such engagement is routinely integrated into the work of offices across the United States government. Throughout this work, we are focused on the critical task of ensuring inclusion, protecting all groups everywhere. The strategy affirms that pluralism, inclusion and diversity are a source of national strength in a rapidly changing world while also referring the rights, reaffirming the rights to free speech, a free press, peaceful assembly and other core civil liberties. I know that religious freedom is often perceived to be intention with other core values and virtues, that as USIP's report states, many see the language of religious freedom as a tool that has historically been used to limit the advancement of minority and women's rights and most recently LGBTQI plus communities in particular. But that is not how our office operates. We advocate for the right of every single person to organize their life according to their conscience. No one should have the religion or values of another imposed on them. Just as your report recommends, we are extraordinarily conscious of the need to explore the common challenges and needs of diverse at-risk communities to enable broader cooperation across advocacy agendas. And for that reason, our office prioritizes not just simple cases of religious persecution, but those that intersect with so many other communities and realms of human rights. As we do this work of advocating for people around the world, we are sometimes asked, I know sometimes you get asked the same question as well, which is who are you as the United States? Or who are you as Americans to speak to other countries about their human rights conditions and to get involved in what they perceive as their internal matters? I believe that we're uniquely situated to stand up for religious freedom around the world for a number of reasons. First, we are ourselves a country that was founded on religious freedom and by individuals who were fleeing religious persecution themselves. Second, our Constitution's Bill of Rights begins with the protection of human rights, including protection of religious freedom. And third, we are a country of immigrants. People come here from all around the world and demand that their elected representatives and government officials promote our values in their homelands. They would have it no other way. So who are we to stand up for religious freedom around the world? In many ways, we are representatives of the rest of the world here in the United States. And we are stepping up our efforts, including right here at home, where we continue our pursuit of creating a more perfect union. As President Biden said at the United We Stand Summit last month, we have to stand united against hate-fueled violence because it's real and you know it better than anyone to affirm that an attack on one group of us is literally an attack on all of us. It has been an honor to stand with you, to stand united with you, to stand together with you both in efforts to build respect and counter hate here in the United States and around the world. As we do this work addressing discriminatory laws and policies around the world and working on individual cases of repression, we must keep in mind that long-term solutions will be critical to outcomes going forward. Education is one of our most important tools and one of our most powerful tools in countering hatred and in promoting peace. At the UN General Assembly last month, and following our engagement with the champion for education for girls and boys around the world, Malala Yusufzai, we launched a new initiative called Pathways to Respect. This initiative focuses on supporting education as a critical tool in protecting religious freedom and sowing the seeds that promote tolerance and prevent hatred from taking root. In times like these, it's easy to become overwhelmed with the day-to-day issues and the multiple challenges that we face. So as we continue to work together to respond to the injustices we see, let's ensure that we are doing everything we can to get ahead of tomorrow's challenges. In doing so, I remain optimistic and I remain encouraged because as our challenges have grown, our capacity and our determination to address them is stronger than ever. Religion and religious actors can be such a force for good in the world. And we are focused on engaging in partnership with all of you in a way that improves lives and saves lives and advances peace and security. I want to again thank you for all of your leadership, for all of your work and for your partnership. Again, I'm deeply honored to be here, particularly on International Religious Freedom Day, and very appreciative of everything that we're doing together to seek a more peaceful and just world. Thank you so much. Good morning to all of you, both those of you here in the room with us and to the many of you joining us online as well. Welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. I'm delighted that Ambassador Hussein is able to spend a little more time with us to sit down with my colleague Paolo Acha Kaka and myself to explore in a little more detail some of the issues that you raised and your remarks just now gave us a lot of food for thought, a lot to work on together. I was grateful to you for mentioning the new report that my colleagues Nox Thames and I just published that's focused on maintaining International Religious Freedom as a central tenant of U.S. national security. There are copies of the report I'll mention outside and I hope you will feel free to avail yourselves of a copy of that. Just now, Ambassador Hussein, in your remarks, you made very clear that you feel that protecting advancing religious freedom is an integral component of the broader U.S. commitment to democracy and human rights around the world and that dovetails very nicely with one of the central recommendations coming out of our report. However, in many settings around the world today, we find governments deliberately sowing social division almost as a technique of governance, as a political strategy often for staying in power with religious communities and particularly religious minorities often finding themselves the primary victims of such tactics. In the face of this, how do you think we can make a convincing case to our interlocutors who have chosen this path that it's ultimately unsustainable? Well, thank you so much for hosting us, Peter and Paul, and again for all of your partnership and all of the work that you're doing here and everything that we've been able to collaborate on together over the years. We've got to make clear to those leaders in those countries that what they're doing is wrong. First of all, we can never lose sight of that. There is no replacement for sitting down face-to-face with someone and saying we think that the direction that you're headed in is wrong. It's not good for your people. It's not the right way to treat people and it's not the right way to conduct ourselves as human beings. But beyond that, we've got to make clear to them that it's not in their interest. There is report after report now that has come out and indicated that countries that sow division, countries that repress human rights and religious freedom are more likely to be less stable. And so it's been very clear in the work that we've been doing and clear across our government that if we are going to be successful in working with the international community, which is a very important part of the answer to this question too, it's not just the United States, but we work together with civil society, with multilateral organizations, together to demonstrate that taking that approach is an approach that will inevitably backfire, is an approach that will inevitably lead to instability, and in many cases is an approach that will lead to insecurity and instability that the leaders of those countries are themselves not immune from. We've seen so much turnover and transition in the same countries and political instability where we have these types of tensions and where the government has restricted human rights and it's an important aspect of our policy to remind countries that what they're doing in certain instances is not only wrong, it's not only against their international obligations that they've signed up for, whether it's the Universal Human Declaration of Human Rights or so many other trees or international instruments, but ultimately, as I said, is against their own interests as leaders and as countries. Thank you. Pawascha, let me turn to you now. I know that you have worked on and in Afghanistan for many, many years and more recently you've been convening a set of working groups under the auspices of USIP that are comprised of Afghan experts located around the world and in Afghanistan itself who are working to find creative approaches for addressing the many challenges facing the country under the current Taliban-led government. I'd like to ask you if you could share your views with us on how we should think about the relationship between religious freedom and prospects for creative religious engagement and that broader struggle for creating greater inclusivity in Afghanistan. Thank you, Peter, and thank you, Ambassador, for your remarks. In Afghanistan, it's a very complex issue because so many of the religious minority communities have actually left the country. So the Sikh and Hindu communities have left because of the oppression that they've been experiencing and were experiencing under the Taliban. So there are very few left. But we do have an important Hazara minority community, a Shia minority community that unfortunately are under attack right now in Afghanistan. We've seen girls being attacked and killed. The religious sites of the Hazars have been attacked on important days. Muharram, which was one of the days that are celebrated in mourning in Afghanistan that was allowed in the past. The Taliban have now not allowed it this year. So there's some of these enrochements on religious freedom that we're seeing of the Taliban that are very negative. But in terms of thinking about inclusion, I mean, these are key aspects that need to be, that tension needs to be paid toward in terms of understanding how do we even speak about inclusion in a space where there's so much enroachment on religious freedom issues inside of Afghanistan. And it's not just on people who are not of the Sunni faith. It is even those in Afghanistan who are of the Sunni faith and from even the Hanafi jurisprudence perspective that believe differently than the Taliban that are being oppressed and so how to include those voices. One of the things that my colleague who is also the director of the Afghanistan and Central Asia team has recommended in one of his previous writings on USIP website was whether we think about inclusion as part of a way of leveraging or pathway towards something that the Taliban wants. And one of the things the Taliban have said and that we have not been prepared to as US government to even talk about is recognition. And so the question is are there ways of leveraging among the international community this need for or this desire for recognition with ideas on supporting inclusive governance and inclusive government itself. And making clear that the criteria for an inclusive government is not just inclusive government of Taliban leaders that might represent different ethnic groups but those that are religiously inclusive as well and that represent the religious diversity inside of Afghanistan as well as the gender diversity inside of Afghanistan as well as the ethnic diversity. And we can look at Islamic principles for that and yes there are many Islamic countries that are willing to come up and say well there is an Islamic framework for this to talk about inclusion but the question is whether the international community is ready and willing to think about what are the things that they can leverage to move towards inclusive governance in Afghanistan. Such a difficult, complicated issue. Thank you. Ambassador Hussain, anything that you'd like to add on this particular point on Afghanistan? Afghanistan is a place that's very dear to my heart. We had the opportunity to engage in Afghanistan around the country on a number of occasions during my time as special envoy to the organization of Islamic cooperation and one of the things that was very clear when I went to Afghanistan with the mandate of working with the OIC was that organization, the organization of Islamic cooperation has more credibility and I think more influence in Afghanistan than almost any other place that I visited and part of the reason for that is because the people are so closely tied to Islamic principles and their understanding and their various understandings of what those principles are. The reason why I mention that is because it's so critical right now for leaders within Muslim communities, religious leaders and others, civil society leaders to come together and we're starting to see this and make clear some of the principles that you talked about, the importance of girls' access to education, the importance of providing access to work for women and they can do so in such a credible way from within the Islamic tradition and Islamic principles. We've tried to, as a government, play a convening role for some of those leaders and I have a colleague that you work with closely, Rina Mary who's seized with Islam with Tom West, our special representative for Afghanistan. They're doing tremendous work to make sure that we're doing everything that we can in the smartest and most strategic way to help convene those voices and amplify those voices. Ultimately, they're going to be some of the most persuasive individuals and groups that can have an impact on what's happening on the ground there. Thank you. I want to move on now to something that actually really jumped out at me in the remarks that you just delivered. Those of us who follow dynamics around conflict and violence in the world today cannot help but have noticed that in recent years online platforms, very digital technologies have been serving as a major catalyst, accelerant and driving factor and indeed in many ways creating new forms of conflict and I was struck by the fact that you specifically referenced technologies and digital platforms in your remarks, which is not something you generally hear in international religious freedom speeches and so I wanted to ask you whether you think that there are specific or distinctive ways that the dynamics of religion circulate in online hate and extremism. If you look at the dynamic of mass atrocities and genocide, we talk about not just those atrocities or crimes against humanity or genocide, but the path that it takes to get there and that's not something that just occurs overnight or even over the course of months or even a couple of years. It is a long process and there are certain signs that we've seen in a number of atrocities and genocides that have occurred around the world. Secretary Blinken was very struck by the path to genocide exhibit at the Holocaust Museum when he made the determination of the genocide against Rohingya and as part of that path to genocide, you see dehumanizing rhetoric being used within society, sometimes from government officials. You see open calls for genocide. You see misinformation being spread about particular religious beliefs or individuals who follow those beliefs. You see calls for attacks on places of worship and in the modern world, we're seeing those things now happen online as well and you're seeing misinformation spread faster and faster and it's not just on the most well-known social media platforms where people post information, tweets, Facebook posts, but now we're seeing cell phones which so much of the world's population has easy access to as devices in which on platforms like WhatsApp and others, people are getting all kinds of information such that I know many of the people in this room know this dynamic of having a conversation with a family member, it could be a parent, it could be a sibling, it could be over the phone, it could be when you go home for Thanksgiving where they say, did you hear about X, Y, and Z? Oh, where did you hear about that? Oh, I saw it. It was online. It turns out it's something that you got on WhatsApp and oftentimes it's incorrect information and that same dynamic is a presence not just in our broader politics and broader public discourse but now crossing into the space of religion to target particular groups. We saw the impact of that in the genocide of Rohingya. We've seen it in other places as well and we're seeing it used to discuss broader debates within the religion space that can have implications for so many of the issues that we're facing right now. So it is a real serious issue. You combine that with the technology of artificial intelligence and facial recognition and tools that governments can use as instruments of control. We've seen them used against the Uighurs, for example, in Xinjiang, but other communities as well and we're seeing them not just domestically being used but now in efforts involving transnational repression as well where some tools are being used to try to control communities even after they've gone out of the country and been forced to go out of the country and to bring into compliance with the government's position on certain issues and on individuals that are living in different parts of the world. Paul Wash, anything you'd like to add on this point? Well, I think the ambassador covered a lot of important issues. One of the things that I wanted to highlight was particularly for religious women we're seeing that space sort of closing for them in terms of their presence because oftentimes once they take on a measure of leadership their slander is often used against them that can really reduce their presence and their ability to do the important work that they do in peace building that we've seen. So this is one of the things that we've seen that has happened against some of our religious women who are doing very important work in terms of negotiating and meeting at the local level that because certain people in the community, certain actors, bad actors, spoilers don't appreciate that the work that they're doing they attack them on social media and slander them on social media. And so this is tightening the space, closing the space for the role that these women can actually play. So that's one of the negative pieces as well. One of the things that was actually raised in a conversation I recently had was how people on social media seem to find it easy to slander others unfortunately in ways that really undermine their career. So it's not just for religious women but for doctors that are really important in the space. And using religious frameworks can be very dangerous when it comes to accusations of blasphemy and apostasy that may be completely untrue but then they're using these platforms for doing it. So it's something that we're happy to hear that Facebook has been taking certain measures against some of these things, proactive measures, but at the same time there's so much that falls to the cracks that communities and civil society organizations that we engage with, we need to be able to better inform them of ways that they can act against this and inform the authorities to be able to take down these websites and take action to protect themselves really on these sites. And ultimately, of course, there's much more that can be done but it's impossible to deal with all this material. You take something on one platform and it migrates to another platform. How do you deal with the problem of people texting information to each other that's incorrect and that has no particular host as a platform but it's just something that somebody wrote as their own opinion and then it goes viral because people are passing it around. And it speaks again to the point that we made about education and you can't deal with all the material that's out there but what we can do is instill particularly young people the tools that they can use to navigate all the information that we're receiving. In a world in which we're dealing with deep fakes and other technology like that, manipulation of video, putting in audio into... There was just a story about this this week that rise to a pretty high level, putting in fake audio into videos and attributing statements to people that they didn't make. These things are not just going to have implications for how we deal with each other and for human rights but there's real serious potential foreign policy and national security implications as this stuff circulates in a very rapid manner. Yeah, this is such a complex space and just to your point about misinformation and disinformation, in our own work, the institute's work in Ukraine where we're working very directly with civil society groups that are seeking to preserve Ukrainian social cohesion in the face of so many sources of pressure coming from Russia and Russian proxies. One of our local partners contacted me to show me what appeared to be a press communique coming from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. And when I looked at it, it was indeed based on a press release that we had just issued, the exact same format, exact same language, but they had added some additional text that completely twisted the meaning of what the embassy appeared to be saying. So, you know, such a difficult challenge. As a final question, I wanted to kind of telegraph out to the big picture. USIP President Lise Grande, whom we heard from earlier, has prioritized the idea and I think what she sees as the value proposition of a distinctively American model of peace-building. And I couldn't help but think of that, Ambassador Hussain, when in your remarks just now you argued that in your view the United States is uniquely situated to stand up for religious freedom around the world. I heard in this the idea that America's story with religion is something that we should perhaps view as an asset in our global engagement. And I'd like to close our discussion by inviting you to share your views on how we should think about religious freedom promotion and religious engagement as aspects of American diplomacy in the context of broader shifts currently underway in the global order. So it's just a really tiny little question. Yeah, it's very important. One of the most important aspects of the work that we're doing is not just on a day-to-day basis addressing discriminatory laws, discriminatory policies, working on individual cases of repression that we might get emailed about in the middle of the night, doing the work of planting seeds for long-term initiatives and education in other areas, but really serving as advocates for this important set of issues within the broader foreign policy and national security apparatus. And we're very fortunate to work for a president and for a secretary of state who really understand the important role that human rights play, the instrumental role that human rights play in our broader foreign policy and national security objectives. And it's always, in my view, so much more powerful when you have our senior-most leaders at that level raising these issues with their counterparts, our assistant secretaries who are responsible for particular regions. When they're sitting across the table from their counterparts and they're speaking about the importance of protecting religious freedom and human rights as an integral part of our bilateral relationship, as an integral part of protecting security and advancing our interests together, it takes the importance of the issues to such a high level. Of course, there's the understanding that someone in my role, had a few different roles within government, including the role of someone that works in multilateral institutions on the broader set of foreign policy issues. And I was always so happy to get a call from Ambassador Saperstein or Ambassador Johnson Cook to ask if I could raise particular religious freedom issues in my engagements in different parts of the world, because you have that advocacy coming then from leaders in our government that our counterparts may not expect, and it reinforces the views in such an important, powerful way and shows that it's an important priority and it shows it as implications for so many aspects of our foreign policy. So if I had to zoom out and say, I believe that that's the direction that we've been moving in. We'd like to do even more work in that area so that we never see human rights and national security as competing, but actually complementary and overlapping and integral to protecting our broader foreign policy and national security objectives. Thank you. Paul Walsh, any thoughts from you on this? So I really agree with this proposition that international religious freedom really is part of the DNA of the United States of America and our founding fathers. You know, I think going back to even looking at Thomas Jefferson and his thoughts on religious freedom and his dialogue with the Tunisian ambassador on who could be a president of the United States someday that is not a Christian. I mean, it's really important to understanding what is embedded in our DNA about religious freedom and also that definitions of liberty as Ambassador Hussain mentioned include this idea of religious freedom that is very essential to the DNA of the United States and our founding values. So both of those issues are really important. The one thing that I just also wanted to add was with my own ancestors on my mother's side having come to the United States in pursuit of religious freedom because they were being persecuted and my own grandfather being a conscientious objector and not being able to express his belief of not fighting in a war because he did not believe in fighting really shows how important religious freedom and the value of religious freedom is baked into the United States and I think as Ambassador Hussain mentioned this is a country of immigrants. Yes, we have problems. Yes, there are issues we need to deal with in terms of indigenous communities in the United States and our history of repression of their religious freedoms. At the same time, we also need to celebrate some of what we stand for in terms of religious freedom and our history and how we're made up of immigrants that really can show the world the importance of religious freedom and our own values in terms of where we come from and who we are. So thank you. Thanks very much, Paul Walsh. I think it's a nice way to conclude our conversation and dare I say even a hopeful way to conclude our conversation, a time when we don't often get to end conversations with a note of hope. I'm grateful to you Ambassador Hussain for making time to pay us an extended visit. Here at the Institute today and for sharing your views in this conversation. And thank you also, Paul Walsh, for sitting down with us today. And to those of you joining us here in the room, don't run away because you already heard the invitation from our president that we have a reception waiting for you outside and I hope you will stick around for a little bit. To those of you joining us online, thank you so much for being with us today and we look forward to welcoming all of you to another event here at the U.S. Institute of Peace very soon. Thank you very much everyone and take care.