A standing platform, not a one-off convening

Across the post-Soviet space, religion has rarely been left to itself — managed by the Russian Empire before the revolution, by the Soviet state for most of the century after it, and still approached today, in much of the region, as a security question first: something to be registered, monitored, and contained rather than engaged. The vocabulary of extremism attaches easily to communities whose only distinguishing feature is that they are small or unfamiliar, and legislation written for genuine threats is applied to congregations that pose none. The professionals who might push back — officials, educators, religious leaders themselves — often lack a shared language for it, because the competence to understand a neighbor’s faith on its own terms was never taught anywhere.

The problem is not identical across these countries. Ukraine faces it under war. Georgia carries its own scars of Russian invasion. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan legislate from a securitized inheritance while managing genuinely plural societies. Moldova sits between pressures from several directions at once. What they share is not a condition but a deficit: before the Eurasia Panel, there was no standing place to work on any of it together.