Report
Crossing the Threshold: Building Religious Freedom Infrastructure
About this report
Abstract
An account of what changes when religious freedom work stops being a series of projects and becomes infrastructure. Drawing on a decade of engagement in Kazakhstan, it documents the January 2026 Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy certificate course for law enforcement, and the shift from cooperation that depends on individual relationships to cooperation carried by institutions.
The title names the argument. A training course delivered once is an event; the same course embedded in a national academy’s curriculum is infrastructure, and only the second kind survives a change of personnel. This report tracks Kazakhstan’s movement across that threshold — from project-based intervention toward arrangements that hold on their own.
Its evidence is the record since 2013: cooperation restored between government bodies and religious communities, people once prosecuted for their beliefs no longer facing prosecution, and professional education reaching the officials, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers whose daily decisions determine whether a legal right is a real one.
The framing generalizes beyond Kazakhstan. Post-communist states inherited institutions built to manage religion rather than engage it, and the question of how that inheritance is replaced — not merely criticized — is the one the Eurasia Panel exists to work on.