The Price of Freedom Denied

This is a seminal work. The focus is religious freedom - ‘the orphan of human rights’ – and its denial across much of the world. Drawing on an innovative data set developed by the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA), the authors map in three chapters how the denial of religious freedom has become ‘pervasive and pernicious’; how even countries that have constitutional and legal protections for religious freedom nonetheless routinely break such promises, and the escalating societal costs in abuse and displacement of individuals and communities.

After these important preliminaries, six country-specific case-studies are treated in two chapters where each country illustrates a distinct emphasis shared by a cluster of nations. Japan is chosen to illuminate ‘high levels of religious freedoms’ enjoyed in state and society by some forty five countries; Brazil exemplifies some twenty countries which exemplify ‘religious freedoms with some tensions’; then Nigeria is offered as instance of some 37 countries where temporal power is partitioned between government and religion, what that authors dub ‘power partition’.