Berkley Center

Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served in the George W. Bush administration from June 2001 to January 2009, ultimately holding the office of deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor. From 1999 to 2001 he was a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and served as chairman in 2001. Abrams has also been president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and assistant secretary of state during the Reagan administration. His single-authored works include Undue Process (1993), Security and Sacrifice (1995), and Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America (1997); he has also edited books on contemporary just war theory and religion and American foreign policy. Abrams has degrees from Harvard College, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School.

Jonathan Fox is professor at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He specializes in the influence of religion on politics, using both quantitative and qualitative methodology to analyze the impact of religion on domestic conflict, international relations. Fox was part of the Templeton Foundation-funded Religion and State project from 2008 to 2011, which collected and analyzed data on government involvement in religion. Since 2001, he has been a research fellow at Bar-Ilan's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, becoming a senior research fellow in 2004. He has also worked on the Minorities at Risk and State Failure projects. Fox is the author or editor of several books and over fifty research articles and book chapters, including Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data (forthcoming) and Religion in International Relations Theory: Interactions and Possibilities (2013, with Nukhet Sandal). He received his B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Brian Grim is president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and a leading expert on the socioeconomic impact of restrictions on religious freedom and international religious demography. Grim served as 2015-2016 chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith and works closely with the Business for Peace platform of the United Nations Global Compact. From 2006 to 2014 Grim directed the largest social science effort to collect and analyze global data on religion at the Pew Research Center. He also worked for two decades as an educator in the former Soviet Union, China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. He is author of numerous articles and books, including The Price of Freedom Denied (2010), and writes the Weekly Number blog. He was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2014 to 2016. Grim holds a doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University.

Robert W. Hefner is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Hefner is a social theorist who specializes in the anthropology of religion, ethics and law (including sharia law), education and youth development, as well as the comparative study of gender, citizenship, globalization, and modernity. Hefner was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

Ed Husain is a British writer and political advisor. Currently, he is a senior fellow and Andrew H. Siegal Professor in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy at the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. In addition to publishing three books, Husain served as a senior advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Husain has a B.A. in history from the University of North London and an M.A. in Middle East studies from SOAS, University of London.

Paul Marshall is a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom. Among the world’s leading scholars of religious freedom, Marshall played a pivotal role in directing the world’s attention to the modern crisis of Christian persecution. Marshall is the author and editor of more than twenty books on religion and politics, especially religious freedom, including more recently, Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (2013, with Lela Gilbert and Nina Shea), Silenced: How Apostasy Laws and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide (2011, with Nina Shea), Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion (2009), Religious Freedom in the World (2008), and Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law (2005). Marshall was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.