Religions for Peace

Religions for Peace (RfP) is the world's largest and most representative multi-religious coalition, bringing together leaders and communities from Baha'i, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Zoroastrian, and other traditions in common action for peace. Founded in 1970 as the World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP) at its first World Assembly in Kyoto, Japan, the organization operates through a network of over 90 national and 6 regional Interreligious Councils (IRCs) reaching local communities across every inhabited continent. Its International Secretariat is based in New York, adjacent to the United Nations, where it holds consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), UNESCO, and UNICEF. Since 2024, Religions for Peace has positioned itself as a lead multi-faith voice in AI governance, bringing together religious leaders across traditions to advocate for human dignity, ethical accountability, and the disarmament of lethal autonomous weapons.

Founding and structure

The World Conference of Religions for Peace convened for the first time in Kyoto, Japan, on October 16–21, 1970, after nearly a decade of preparatory work by senior leaders from the world's major faith traditions who had been exploring possibilities for a "religious summit" on peace. In December 1970, the international headquarters were established at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York, and the organization was immediately granted UN status as an associated international organization. The name was later shortened to Religions for Peace as the organization became a permanent international body rather than a periodic conference.

RfP's global architecture operates through Interreligious Councils — the mechanism through which religious leaders and their communities engage in multi-religious cooperation on peace, humanitarian response, gender equity, and sustainable development. The World Assembly (meeting approximately every eight to ten years) is the highest governing body; the World Council governs between Assembly gatherings; and an Executive Committee handles ongoing affairs through the International Secretariat. The 2025 World Council in Istanbul was the Council's first in-person gathering in six years, reflecting the organization's post-pandemic reinvigoration.

Dr. Francis Kuria Kagema — formerly Secretary General of the African Council of Religious Leaders-Religions for Peace and of the Religions for Peace Inter-Religious Council of Kenya — was announced as Secretary General on February 12, 2024, following the resignation of Prof. Azza Karam, who had served since March 2020. Dr. Kuria brings over two decades of multi-religious leadership experience, anchoring the organization's growing AI and digital-governance agenda inside its established peace, gender-equity, and humanitarian-response work.

AI governance advocacy

UN General Assembly side event (September 2024)

In September 2024, at the 79th session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Religions for Peace co-organized the hybrid panel "Faith, Ethics, and AI: Shaping a Future for Global Peace" alongside World Council of Churches, Stop Killer Robots, and the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, under the auspices of the Multifaith Advisory Council Peace and Security Working Group. Dr. Francis Kuria Kagema addressed the panel, calling for religious voices to shape transparent and accountable AI development grounded in "justice, equality, and compassion." Campaign Outreach Manager Isabelle Jones of Stop Killer Robots called for increased accountability and civil society participation in autonomous weapons regulation; René Holbach of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs framed international law as the expression of society's ethical and moral preferences; and Zeshan Zafar of the AI Faith and Civil Society Commission pressed for virtue embedded in algorithmic design. The panel demonstrated multi-stakeholder convergence between faith actors, the humanitarian-disarmament coalition, and multilateral diplomats on AI ethics.

Hiroshima AI Ethics for Peace (July 2024)

On July 9–10, 2024, the Religions for Peace Japan national chapter co-organized "AI Ethics for Peace: World Religions commit to the Rome Call" in Hiroshima with the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Life, the Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace, and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel's Commission for Interfaith Relations. The two-day gathering brought together over 150 participants representing eleven world religions and produced sixteen new signatories to the Rome Call for AI Ethics. Hiroshima's symbolic weight — as the city most associated with technology-enabled mass destruction — grounded the event's framing: that no other location more vividly attests to the consequences of unethical technology, and that faith traditions bear a shared obligation to ensure AI does not reproduce comparable harm. Participants issued the Hiroshima Appeal, calling on the international community to resolve conflicts through peaceful means and to commit AI development to the good of humanity and the planet. The event marked the first formal expansion of the Rome Call signatory base into Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, and Zoroastrian traditions at institutional scale.

World Council Istanbul (July 2025) and Shared Sacred Flourishing

In late July 2025, the Religions for Peace World Council convened in Istanbul, Republic of Türkiye, with over 60 religious leaders from the full multi-religious breadth of the network — Baha'i, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Zoroastrian — in its first in-person World Council session since the COVID-19 pandemic. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew delivered the opening keynote, calling for the formation of a "shared sacred worldview" as a response to contemporary materialism and the dangers of AI-assisted abstraction that risks dehumanizing persons and enabling structural injustice. The Council adopted the "Shared Sacred Flourishing" framework as its vision document, grounding multi-religious collaboration in a recognition of shared sacred values — love, compassion, justice — as the foundation for responding to planetary crises including the unconstrained development of AI and the normalization of autonomous weapons in armed conflict. On AI specifically, the Council warned that faith communities must play a central role in AI governance to ensure that technological advancement serves rather than undermines human dignity, and that the use of AI in national wars posed urgent moral challenges requiring coordinated multi-religious response.

Policy agenda (2026)

In June 2026, Religions for Peace convened its International Council Meeting in Mauritius, with AI ethics among the explicit agenda items — a further institutionalization of AI governance inside the organization's main deliberative cycle. The June 2026 rfp.org article "Marrying Wisdom to Action: Religious Leaders Must Act to Shape the Future of AI" articulated the organization's four-track AI advocacy posture: articulating unified multifaith ethical foundations on AI-enabled weapons; influencing AI governance policy processes at global, regional, and national levels; launching awareness campaigns linking AI ethics to security concerns; and leveraging religious institutions' logistical architecture to deliver ethical awareness at mass scale to congregants and communities no secular advocacy network reaches.

Funding and institutional support

Religions for Peace's financial base reflects its origins in Japanese religious philanthropy and its deep UN-adjacent positioning in New York. The Fetzer Institute — a Kalamazoo, Michigan foundation devoted to love and forgiveness as transformative forces — is the organization's principal current funder; a March 2025 partnership announcement confirmed a multi-year Sacred Shared Flourishing initiative underpinned by $2.35 million in programmatic support and $200,000 in general operating grants, directly financing the shared-sacred-worldview agenda institutionalized at the Istanbul World Council. Rissho Kosei-Kai, the world's largest Buddhist lay organization and a founding partner of RfP since the 1970 Kyoto inaugural assembly, provides multi-year institutional support and co-organized the Hiroshima AI Ethics for Peace gathering through the RfP Japan chapter. The GHR Foundation contributes to the Multi-Religious Humanitarian Fund, which seeds interfaith humanitarian projects across twenty-plus countries. Germany's Federal Foreign Office has funded the 10th World Assembly and the Assembly on Women, Faith, and Diplomacy, recognizing RfP's convening role on faith-and-peace policy.

Relation to Stop Killer Robots and autonomous weapons

Religions for Peace's AI advocacy operates at the intersection of the faith-institutional moral-framing track and the multilateral humanitarian-disarmament campaign. The organization's participation in the September 2024 UNGA panel placed its Secretary General on the same platform as Stop Killer Robots' campaign outreach team and UN disarmament officials — signaling its engagement not just as a parallel moral voice but as a participating actor in the autonomous-weapons coalition's UN-track advocacy. The Hiroshima Appeal's explicit call to use AI only for the good of humanity and to resolve conflicts through peaceful means maps directly onto the Stop Killer Robots campaign's treaty demand, giving the faith-institutional moral-framing track a working connection to the humanitarian-disarmament treaty strategy at the UNGA level. Religions for Peace's multi-tradition reach — covering Buddhist and Shinto traditions engaged through the Japan chapter, Muslim communities engaged through the Africa-based Secretary General, and Jewish communities engaged through co-organization with the Chief Rabbinate — extends the Stop Killer Robots coalition's moral-authority base beyond the predominantly Christian-tradition faith-institutional interventions that had characterized prior autonomous-weapons advocacy.