Student Profile: Kelly Thomas

By: Teresa Donnellan

March 31, 2016

In late 2014, RFP research assistant Kelly Thomas received an honorable mention from the Clark Law Society’s fifth annual Religious Liberty Student Writing Competition for her paper titled “Teaching a Man to Fish: The Role of International Religious Freedom in Establishing Stable Democracies Abroad and Achieving U.S. National Security Objectives.” Thomas’s paper asserts the cultural necessity of respect for religious freedom in the establishment of a stable democracy. She rigorously explains the components of religious freedom and how they function to stabilize democracy, citing the role of religious freedom (or lack thereof) in the institution of democracy in Iraq, the United States, and Syria. 

Since graduating from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in May 2015, Thomas has moved to London, where she attends King’s College London. Thomas is currently working on her M.A. in Terrorism, Security, and Society and plans to write her thesis on if and how secularization and the subsequent removal of religion from the public square in the United States and Western Europe contributed to the rise and growth of ISIS. Questions she plans to explore include how dismissing religion as a factor in world events led to the policy decisions in post-invasion Iraq where ISIS was first able to gather momentum and how secularism in western culture is aiding in ISIS's foreign fighter recruitment in the United States and Europe.

When asked about how her two years of work at the Religious Freedom Project influenced both her award-winning paper and her current studies, Thomas cited the project for shaping her views on international religious freedom and for providing her with invaluable access to articles and scholars like RFP associate scholar Dan Philpott, whose work on the politics of reconciliation, Just and Unjust Peace, served as a tremendous resource in her own research. Thomas specifically drew from knowledge she gained in three classes, two of which were taught by RFP director Thomas Farr.

Kelly Thomas plains to pursue a Ph.D. that further builds upon her master’s thesis and earlier undergraduate work. Through her research, she hopes to provide a practical framework that brings religion back into policymakers’ vocabularies in order to better inform U.S. actions abroad when dealing with violent religious extremism. 
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