Berkley Center

Thomas F. Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, an NGO committed to achieving worldwide acceptance of religious liberty. Farr is also a senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. From 2006 to 2018 he was an associate professor of the practice of religion and world affairs at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at the Berkley Center; during 2017 and 2018 he was director of the Religious Freedom Research Project and from 2011 to 2016 director of the Religious Freedom Project, both at the Berkley Center. After a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service—which included teaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy, serving as an advisor during U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and leading an interagency task force on verification provisions for the START II Treaty—Farr served as the first director of the U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2003.

William Inboden is executive director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security, associate professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas-Austin. Inboden is a non-resident fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and senior advisor with Avascent International. Previously he served as the Legatum Institute's senior vice president and senior director for the White House’s Strategic Planning on the National Security Council. Inboden also worked at the Department of State as a member of the Policy Planning Staff and special advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom. He is the author of Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (2008) and Foreign Policy magazine contributing editor. From 2014 to 2016, he was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project. Inboden received his Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. degrees from Yale University and A.B. from Stanford University.

Daniel Philpott is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Philpott specializes in religion and global politics, with emphases on reconciliation, religious freedom, and theories of religious actors' political behavior. He has also participated in faith-inspired reconciliation efforts in some of the world’s worst conflict zones, including Kashmir and the Great Lakes region of Africa. Philpott's publications include Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (2012); God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, co-authored with Monica Toft and Timothy Shah); Strategies of Peace: Transforming Conflict in a Violent Word (2010, edited with Gerard F. Powers); The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice (2006); and Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (2001). From 2011 to 2016, he was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project and is currently a senior associate scholar with the Religious Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.​

Timothy Samuel Shah is a distinguished research scholar in the Politics Department at the University of Dallas, as well as as a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute and the principal investigator for the Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society (FORIS) project at the Religious Freedom Institute. Previously a research professor of government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, he also served as associate director of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project, director for international research of the center's Religious Freedom Research Project, and associate professor of the practice of religion and global politics in Georgetown University's Government Department. He is a political scientist specializing in religious freedom as well as in the broad relationship between religious and political dynamics in theory, history, and contemporary practice. He is author of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott) and editor of Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution (2018, with Daniel Philpott) and Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (2018, with Jack Friedman). Shah received his A.B., magna cum laude, in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 2002, both from Harvard University.

Tamara Wittes is a senior fellow and the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Wittes served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from November of 2009 to January 2012, coordinating US policy on democracy and human rights in the Middle East for the State Department. Wittes also oversaw the Middle East Partnership Initiative and served as deputy special coordinator for Middle East transitions. She is the author of Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy (Brookings, 2008).