The unhelpful vortex that is the conference industrial complex

In 2017, I saved an op-ed by Robert Shrimsley, the executive editor of The Financial Times, wittily titled “Time for a Vote of No Conference.” It opens with the legendary sentence: “There are far too many desultory gatherings that leave the attendee wondering why exactly they bothered.” That resonated deeply with me.

There’s a professional class of conference attendees.

I too used to travel from conference to conference, only to encounter the same people and organizations time after time, listen to the same first-year university level talks, and have the same conversations. There’s a professional class of conference attendees, says Shrimsley. They always turn up at every conference in their industry, and they always give the same keynote talks.

In my experience, each of these conferences is exactly as Shrimsley describes: “Everyone at a conference is selling something, be it a new product, an existing product or themselves. If they don’t have a new book, they are definitely after a new job.” The coffee is always bad, most people only show up when lunch is served, and you’re always left wondering what you’re taking away from the event.

From democracy to religious freedom: the same pattern everywhere

Each industry organizes events as if their life depended on it. I’ve personally been part of many different circles: conferences in development cooperation, democracy assistance, faith-based gatherings, academic conferences, and for the past decade and a half, religious freedom events. I always hope to learn something new, make a few strategic contacts, perhaps get some funding for a project, and, most importantly, contribute to solving real-life problems.

I’m almost always disappointed. At the end of the conference, all participants express agreement on some vague shared objective. In my case it was “the importance of democracy,” the “need to promote economic development,” or “the need for global attention for religious freedom.” You can fill in the blanks for your own industry or ministry network.

I want to change the world.

Call me an idealist, but I want to change the world. If a conference is not going to make any meaningful contribution toward that, then why bother going?

Many attendees are just happy to be there. But a few select insiders know what’s really going on. They’re the ones making jokes about “electoral tourism,” “evangelical tourism,” “academic tourism,” "mission leader tourism", or whatever variant fits the occasion.

The religious freedom circuit

The religious freedom movement, of which I’m a part and an active player, is no different. This week, the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit took place for the fifth consecutive time at the heart of global power: Washington, DC. There are also the IRF Roundtables that take place every fortnight, online and sometimes in person, and a whole series of regional and national roundtables now taking off.

You could literally be on a plane 50 weeks out of the year, hopping from conference to conference.

Beyond that, there’s a plethora of smaller events taking place continuously all over the globe: seminars, conversations, conferences, and countless online gatherings. It’s quite overwhelming. You could literally be on a plane 50 weeks out of the year, hopping from conference to conference, especially if you add in the events organized by faith-based groups and interreligious dialogue initiatives.

Walk into any of these events and you’ll see an impressive display of religious diversity: turbans, cassocks, kippot, saffron robes, and clerical collars all gathered in one room. It’s visually striking. But the diversity of dress rarely translates into a diversity of ideas.

But what’s the real and tangible impact of all these gatherings?

My good friend Ronald MacMillan, who has spent decades in religious freedom work, captured the typical summit script in a poem he calls “The International Institute for Religious Freedom (IIRF) Blues”, in four bars:

• This is happening and it’s horrifying.
• What are you going to do?
• Because not enough is being done.
• And why aren’t the media taking an interest?

That’s the hymn we sing at every gathering. And then we go home.

Going in circles

Perhaps I shouldn’t be complaining. After all, religious freedom was completely ignored by civil society, media, policymakers, and academics for a long time. This was due in no small part to the devastating effects of secularization theory, which predicted that religion’s public role was decreasing and thereby discouraged any serious consideration of the matter. So we should celebrate the increased attention for the topic.

But I wonder if we’ve confused activity with progress.

But I wonder if we’ve confused activity with progress. We, the organizations in this space, keep encountering each other without any meaningful breakthroughs.

What’s the point of telling each other how much we’re aligned on the importance of Article 18 if it doesn’t translate into tangible results? When was the last time a major religious freedom conference produced a research finding that changed how we work? When did a summit lead directly to a policy change or a prisoner’s release?

I can think of a few cases. The ministerial meetings on religious freedom, now rotating among host countries after the US initiated the process in 2018, have generated some concrete diplomatic commitments. Smaller, closed-door strategy sessions among litigation groups have coordinated legal efforts that got results. But these are exceptions, and notably, they tend to be working meetings with specific objectives rather than large public gatherings designed to “raise awareness.”

The uncomfortable question

Here’s what I’ve started to wonder: maybe the conferences aren’t the disease. Maybe they’re a symptom.

The religious freedom field, like democracy promotion before it, may have reached a point of institutional maturity where the organizations exist primarily to sustain themselves. We have built an infrastructure of NGOs, research institutes, advocacy groups, and funding mechanisms.

That infrastructure needs to justify its existence. Conferences are how we do that. They provide visibility, networking opportunities, and a sense of momentum. They allow us to report back to donors that we are “convening stakeholders” and “building coalitions.”

When funders reward visibility over impact, you optimize for visibility.

None of this is necessarily cynical. The people involved genuinely care about religious freedom. But institutional imperatives have a way of shaping behavior. When your organization’s survival depends on being seen at the table, you show up at every table. When funders reward visibility over impact, you optimize for visibility.

The end of the traveling circus?

One development may force a reckoning. Funds for development cooperation have been tightened globally, not just as a result of the dismantling of USAID, but also as part of a wider trend within Western development cooperation. There will be fewer resources available for this traveling circus.

This could go two ways. Organizations might double down on conferences as a low-cost way to maintain relevance without doing expensive programmatic work. Or the funding squeeze might force a harder conversation about what actually produces results.

What would have to change 

I don’t have a formula for the perfect conference. But I know what questions we should be asking before we organize or attend one.

First: what specific outcome is this gathering designed to produce? Not “raise awareness” or “build community,” but something concrete. A joint advocacy strategy. A coordinated research agenda. A commitment from a specific government official. If the answer is vague, the gathering will be too.

The best working sessions I’ve attended were small and carefully curated.

Second: who needs to be in the room for that outcome to happen, and who doesn’t? The best working sessions I’ve attended were small and carefully curated. The worst were large and open to anyone who wanted to come. Inclusivity feels democratic, but it often produces lowest-common-denominator discussions.

Third: what will we do differently after this gathering that we couldn’t have done before? If the honest answer is “nothing,” then perhaps an email would have sufficed.

The real work of religious freedom happens in courtrooms, legislatures, village councils, and newsrooms. It happens when a lawyer gets someone released, when a law gets amended, when a community finds a way to coexist. If our conferences don’t make that work more effective, we should have the honesty to ask why we keep holding them.

Maybe the answer is that we enjoy seeing each other. That’s a legitimate reason to gather. But we should call it what it is: a reunion, not a strategy session. The persecuted communities we claim to serve deserve that honesty.

Originally published by Five4Faith Substack. Republished with permission.

Dennis P. Petri, PhD is the International Director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom and Founder and scholar-at-large of the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Latin America. He is a Professor in International Relations at the Latin American University of Science and Technology. He is the author of The Specific Vulnerability of Religious Minorities, a book on undetected religious freedom challenges in Latin America.