They Aren't Merging the Religions. They're Building Something Above Them.
The Astana Peace Declaration is now an official United Nations document. A 21-page blueprint for "spiritual diplomacy" exists. A Vatican-linked AI ethics code is in draft. The UK is a formal member.
In September 2025, leaders of the world’s religions gathered in Astana, Kazakhstan, and adopted a 34-point “Astana Peace Declaration.” On 3 October 2025, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the UN, Kairat Umarov, submitted that declaration to the UN Secretary-General. It was registered as UN General Assembly document A/80/425, under agenda item 14: “Culture of peace.” The full text is now part of the UN record, and the Congress Secretariat has confirmed the circulation.
This is not a conspiracy claim, and it is not a claim that the religions are being fused into one global faith. The evidence points somewhere more specific and, in some ways, more consequential: a policy layer is being constructed above and between the religions, staffed by overlapping institutions, funded by states, and increasingly feeding its consensus into international governance. This investigation maps that architecture, names the people who run it, and asks the questions nobody in the mainstream is asking.
What follows is the most complete public map of this ecosystem that we have been able to assemble. Every claim is hyperlinked to a primary or verified source. Where a claim could not be verified, it is either excluded or explicitly marked as unverified. Where the evidence cuts against the thesis, we say so. This is an investigation, not a polemic.
Part One: The UN Hook
The single most concrete fact in this story is that the Astana Peace Declaration is now an official UN document. A/80/425 is a letter from Kazakhstan’s Permanent Representative to the UN Secretary-General, circulated under the “Culture of peace” agenda item of the 80th session, with the full declaration annexed.
It is important to be precise about what this is and is not. It is a circulation document, not a UN General Assembly resolution. No resolution recognising the Congress exists. It is also worth noting that circulation is a routine, low bar: any member state may circulate a document under an agenda item, and thousands are circulated each session. What is notable here is not the mechanism itself but that a religious declaration has been placed inside the formal UN record that member states and UN bodies can cite, as the Congress Secretariat itself explains.
The declaration itself is a 34-point document. Its operative points are worth reading closely, because they are not merely aspirational:
Point 29 calls on the UN General Assembly to recognise the Congress.
Point 30 orders the Congress Secretariat to develop a Roadmap for the international implementation of the declaration.
Point 31 orders the creation of an International Online Center of Spiritual Knowledge.
Point 32 sets the IX Congress for 2028 in Astana.
Point 22 orders the document “The Role of Faith in Combating Climate Change.”
Point 24 calls for universal principles for responsible AI. (Full text of the declaration)
Key Finding
The Astana Peace Declaration 2025 is now formally inside the UN system as document A/80/425, submitted by a sovereign state (Kazakhstan) under the “Culture of peace” agenda item. It is a concrete, documentable example of interfaith consensus being translated into international governance input.
Most striking is the declaration’s own ambition for how its principles should be used. The 2025 text states, verbatim, that “the principles contained in the Declaration may be applied at regional and international levels to be considered in all policy decisions, legislation, educational programs, and mass media in all interested countries.” This is not a purely spiritual document; it explicitly contemplates its principles as input to policy decisions and legislation.
And this is not a sudden 2025 development. The VII Congress declaration of 2022 closed with essentially the same language, stating that its principles “can be disseminated at all regional and international levels, for consideration in all political decisions, legislative norms, educational programs, and mass media in all interested countries.” The near-identical wording across 2022 and 2025 proves this is a sustained programme with a consistent goal, not a one-off summit statement.
There is also a live proposal to go further. In December 2025, at the 11th UNAOC Global Forum in Riyadh, the UN Alliance of Civilizations’ High Representative, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, called for a “spiritual pact among all beliefs and religions”. It is important to be precise about what this is: a proposal made in a speech by a UN official, not a binding UN policy or a resolution. No concrete action has yet been traced to it. But it is the clearest statement yet, from inside the UN system, of the direction this architecture is being pushed.
The UN engagement goes further than circulation. The Congress has held a Special Session on Safeguarding Religious Sites under the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), co-chaired by UNAOC High Representative Miguel Ángel Moratinos and the head of the Congress Secretariat. It has received a UN Secretary-General video message, and it endorses the UN Plan of Action to Safeguard Religious Sites.
Part Two: The Blueprint
If the declaration is the product, the 2023-2033 Development Concept is the plan. Adopted at the XXI Session of the Congress Secretariat in October 2023 and commissioned by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the 21-page document lays out a full architecture for what it calls “spiritual diplomacy.” (2024 was the year the Concept moved into implementation and promotion, not the year of its adoption.)
Its stated mission is “to realize the potential of spiritual diplomacy to help create a just, safe and prosperous future for all humankind.” Its three priority directions are: holding Congresses; systematically implementing declarations; and developing spiritual diplomacy and partnership with international institutions.
The Concept explicitly lists the international bodies whose agendas the Congress considers: the UN, ECOSOC, UNESCO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the OSCE, CICA, the Arab League, the Muslim World League, the OIC, ICESCO, the World Council of Churches, the Interparliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy, the World Community of Buddhists, and KAICIID.
It also contains a striking passage on technology: digital technologies and artificial intelligence, it says, “raise fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, the essence of humanity and the meaning of life.” That sentence is the conceptual seed of the AI ethics work that followed.
Two mechanisms stand out. First, a “Road Map” is to be adopted after each Congress to promote and implement the declaration, coordinated by the Secretariat and approved by its head. Second, the Congress appoints Goodwill Ambassadors on three-year terms, in unlimited numbers, on a voluntary basis.
The Concept also proposes a “Fellowship Program on Interreligious Cooperation” for researchers, cooperation with the UN Academic Impact (UNAI), and a Forum of Young Religious Leaders. It commits to media transparency, to opposing hate speech, and to producing documentaries, podcasts, books and albums. (Read the full Development Concept)
What this means: the interfaith process is not a one-off summit. It is a standing, institutionalised project with a roadmap mechanism, an ambassador corps, an education fellowship programme, and explicit engagement with the agendas of major international bodies.
Part Three: Who Runs It
The Congress is not a neutral gathering of equals. It is state-established and state-chaired. The International Center for Interfaith and Interreligious Dialogue (ICIID) was established by the Government of Kazakhstan via Decree No. 226 on 25 April 2019, and its mandate explicitly includes implementing “state policy in the field of religion.”
The Congress is chaired by the sitting president of Kazakhstan. Its Secretariat is headed by Maulen Ashimbayev, the Chairman of the Senate of the Parliament of Kazakhstan. The Congress was founded by Nursultan Nazarbayev and first convened in September 2003, in direct response to post-9/11 religious tensions, as the Congress Secretariat records and the Jerusalem Post has reported.
Most tellingly, the ICIID’s own chair, Gulsana Kozhabay, has described the Congress as “part of Kazakhstan’s soft power” and part of its “middle power” strategy, tied to President Tokayev’s ambitions for UN reform, in an interview published 6 August 2026.
Key Finding
The Astana Congress is state-established and state-chaired: created by Kazakh government decree, chaired by the sitting president, with the Senate Speaker as head of the Secretariat, and explicitly framed by its own leadership as an instrument of Kazakh soft power and middle-power diplomacy.
This matters because it means the “neutral” interfaith platform serves Kazakh foreign-policy interests, as its own leadership acknowledges. That is not inherently illegitimate, but it is a fact the reader should know when the declaration is presented as the unified voice of world religion.
The Founding Story
The Congress was initiated by Nursultan Nazarbayev and first convened on 23-24 September 2003. Its original purpose was a direct response to the rise in religious tensions and extremism following the 9/11 attacks. The idea was announced at a February 2003 conference, and representatives of the Catholic Church were among the first to support it, during a visit of the Kazakh president to the Vatican, per the Congress Secretariat and the Jerusalem Post.
The Congress is triennial: 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2022, 2025. The 9th is scheduled for 2028, per the Congress Secretariat’s own history.
The Multi-Vector Balancing Act
Kazakhstan’s foreign policy is a “multi-vector” balancing act among Russia, China, the West and the Islamic world. The Congress serves this by giving Kazakhstan a neutral, high-prestige platform that all major powers attend. At the 8th Congress (2025), President Tokayev met Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, Jewish representatives, Patriarch Theophilos III, UNAOC’s Moratinos, a Chinese delegation, and Islamic-world leaders, as News Central Asia reported.
At the 7th Congress (2022), Pope Francis attended, and, according to Reuters, sought a meeting with China’s Xi Jinping while both were in Kazakhstan, but was declined. This is a sensitive diplomatic claim, and it rests on contemporaneous wire reporting rather than on the Congress’s own account.
Tokayev has proposed harnessing “spiritual diplomacy” in organisations including the UN, CICA, the OIC, the OSCE, the SCO, the CIS, ASEAN and the League of Arab States, per News Central Asia, a regional wire service. These quotes and the attendee list rest on that single wire report; they have not been independently corroborated in this investigation.
Note on funding: the exact state budget for the Congress and ICIID is not publicly documented. State funding is strongly implied (government decree, government organiser, state secretariat head), but the specific amount is unverified.
Part Four: The Network Above the Network
Astana is one node in a much larger web. The investigation traced the overlaps between the major interfaith bodies, and one name keeps appearing at the centre: Mohamed Abdelsalam.
Abdelsalam is the Secretary-General of the UAE-based Muslim Council of Elders, and he previously served as Secretary-General of the Higher Committee of Human Fraternity (HCHF), a joint Vatican-Al-Azhar-UAE body created in August 2019. He is also linked to the Zayed Award for Human Fraternity, a US$1 million prize named for the UAE’s founder.
The HCHF’s current leadership, per its official material, is chaired by Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, with Khalid Al-Ghaith as Secretary-General (appointed in November 2023). Mohamed Abdelsalam, who served as the Committee’s first Secretary-General, is currently the Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Elders. The Committee’s older board page still lists earlier roles, including Cardinal Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot (who died in November 2024) and Al-Azhar University president Mohamed Hussein Mahrasawi; that page should be treated as historical rather than current. The current leadership is the authoritative reference.
The Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, funded by the UAE government, keeps its mosque, church and synagogue as physically distinct buildings, as Georgetown University has documented. This is worth noting because it is direct counter-evidence against any claim that the project is merging religions into one. The architecture is about coordination, not fusion.
The Overlap
The following individuals hold verified roles across multiple interfaith bodies. This overlap of personnel, rather than any merger of theology, is how the “policy layer” is assembled. Current HCHF leadership is per its official material; the older board page is historical. Where a role is historical rather than current, it is marked as such.
Mohamed Abdelsalam — Muslim Council of Elders Secretary-General (current); former HCHF Secretary-General; Zayed Award figure. Bridges the Muslim Council of Elders, the HCHF (historically) and the Zayed Award.
Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak — HCHF Chairman (current); Chairman of the Department of Culture, Abu Dhabi. Bridges the HCHF and the UAE state.
Khalid Al-Ghaith — HCHF Secretary-General (appointed November 2023).
Cardinal Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot — former HCHF member; President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (d. November 2024). Historical.
Irina Bokova — former HCHF member; former UNESCO Director-General. Historical.
Sultan Al Remeithi — former HCHF member; Muslim Council of Elders Secretary-General. Historical HCHF role.
Mohamed Hussein Mahrasawi — former HCHF member; Al-Azhar University president. Historical HCHF role.
Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig — former HCHF member; Senior Rabbi at Washington Hebrew Congregation. Historical HCHF role.
The pattern: a small number of individuals and institutions sit on multiple boards across the Vatican, Al-Azhar, the UAE, the UN system and the interfaith NGOs. The UAE-based Muslim Council of Elders is a structural hub. This is how a “policy layer” gets built: not by merging theologies, but by overlapping the people who speak for them.
Religions for Peace: The Scale
Religions for Peace (RfP) reports operating in over 90 countries, with Interreligious Councils in six global regions, and holds consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), UNESCO and UNICEF, per its own organisational profile.
In June 2025, the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s Second Parliamentary Conference on Interfaith Dialogue was held in Rome at the Italian Parliament, jointly hosted by the IPU, the Italian Parliament and Religions for Peace, gathering speakers and members of parliament alongside religious leaders, UN representatives, civil society and academia, as the IPU reported at the time.
This is a significant data point: interfaith consensus is being brought directly into the parliamentary sphere, not just the UN.
The UN Agencies: UNFPA and UNEP
The interfaith layer also runs through the UN’s own agencies. The UN Interagency Task Force on Religion and Sustainable Development (IATF-R) coordinates how UN bodies engage with faith actors, and is co-chaired by UNFPA, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, alongside the UN Office on Sport for Development and Peace and UNAOC. The Task Force convenes a Multifaith Advisory Council of around 40 members drawn from the UN system’s long-term faith-based civil-society partners, per current UNFPA material. (An earlier UN annual report recorded the Council as established in 2018 with 38 members; the current figure is around 40.)
UNEP, the UN Environment Programme, runs the Faith for Earth Coalition, whose first stated strategic goal is, verbatim, “strengthening partnership with faith-based organization’s leadership for policy impact.” Both are concrete examples of religious actors being given a formal, institutional seat inside UN policy machinery, not merely invited to summits.
KAICIID: The Dual-Governance Model
One of the cleanest examples of religion-state institutional integration is KAICIID, the International Dialogue Centre, whose establishment agreement was adopted in 2012 in Vienna. Its governance is deliberately dual: a Council of Parties made up of states (Saudi Arabia, Austria and Spain as founding states, with the Holy See as a founding observer), and a Board of Directors drawn from the world’s major religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism). KAICIID describes itself as “the only intergovernmental organization with a Board of Directors made up of representatives from major world religions.” This is a rare formal structure in which states and religious bodies sit as co-governing partners in a single international institution, and it is a template for the wider architecture this investigation maps.
The Human Fraternity Chain
The Higher Committee of Human Fraternity is itself the product of a longer chain. It began with the 2019 Document on Human Fraternity, signed in Abu Dhabi on 4 February 2019 by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb. That declaration led to the creation of the High Committee in August 2019, and the Committee in turn drove the UN’s establishment of the International Day of Human Fraternity, observed each 4 February. The chain runs from a single interfaith declaration, to a standing committee, to a UN-designated international day: a concrete example of interfaith consensus being institutionalised at the global level.
The Global Ethic: The Intellectual Precedent
None of this is without precedent. The idea of a shared ethical layer above distinct religions was articulated most influentially by the Swiss theologian Hans Küng, whose 1993 Declaration Toward a Global Ethic, presented at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, argued that the world’s religions could agree on a common ethical minimum without surrendering their distinct theologies. Küng’s project was explicitly about a shared ethic, not a merged religion. The contemporary architecture this investigation maps is, in important respects, the institutionalisation of that same idea: a supra-religious layer of shared principles, distinct from any claim of doctrinal fusion.
Part Five: The UK Is In the Room
British readers should know that the UK is a formal member of one of the key bodies in this architecture. The International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD) lists the UK as a governmental member, represented by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), with a year of accession of 2017.
PaRD was founded in 2016, is primarily funded by Germany’s BMZ development ministry, hosts its secretariat at the German development agency GIZ, and counts the World Bank and USAID among its founding partners.
PaRD’s 2026 Annual Forum is scheduled for 10-12 October in Bangkok, at the Wat Saket temple, deliberately timed to coincide with the World Bank/IMF Annual Meetings in the same city that week.
The related G20 Interfaith Forum (IF20) meets 15-17 October in Salt Lake City. IF20 is a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 83-4448155, Provo, Utah) run by the G20 Interfaith Forum Association under President W. Cole Durham, a Brigham Young University professor, per Charity Navigator. It is explicit that it has “informal rather than formal status in the overall G20 process” and is not formally linked to any government.
IF20’s public partners include KAICIID, UNAOC, the Muslim Council of Elders, the Berkley Center, ICLRS and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Key Finding
The UK is a formal governmental member of PaRD (FCDO, since 2017), one of the central bodies translating interfaith consensus into development policy. This is not a fringe project; it is inside the UK’s own foreign policy machinery.
In 2024, the PaRD Annual Forum was held jointly with IF20 in Brasília, Brazil, from 19-22 August, under the theme “Leave No One Behind: The Well-Being of the Planet and Its People,” aligned with Brazil’s G20 presidency, per the PaRD report. Over 300 participants from more than 60 countries attended. IF20 is itself a PaRD member, having acceded in 2022.
The UK’s involvement with PaRD predates its formal FCDO membership. In November 2017, the UK hosted PaRD’s second annual meeting at Wilton Park, the Foreign Office’s diplomatic conference centre, with 70 participants from 19 members and 60 partners, per PaRD’s own history. This earlier hosting role sits alongside the UK’s current formal membership, and shows the UK has been embedded in this architecture since its early years, not merely as a late-joining member.
Part Six: The AI Frontier
The most active frontier of this architecture is artificial intelligence. There are currently three parallel tracks, and they are converging. (It is worth noting that the dominant AI-governance work globally is secular, from the EU AI Act to the UN’s Global Digital Compact; the religious tracks below are a smaller, parallel strand within that larger landscape.)
Track One: The Rome Call for AI Ethics
Launched by the Vatican in February 2020, the Rome Call’s confirmed signatories include Microsoft and IBM (the first, in 2020), Cisco (April 2024), Qualcomm (June 2025) and Salesforce (October 2025), plus the FAO and the Italian Ministry of Innovation. Notably, Google has not signed. The Rome Call remains voluntary and non-binding.
Microsoft — signed February 28, 2020 (first signatory), Brad Smith, President.
IBM — signed February 28, 2020 (first signatory), Dario Gil, SVP & Director of Research.
Cisco — signed April 2024, Chuck Robbins, Chair & CEO.
Qualcomm — signed June 13, 2025, Cristiano Amon, President & CEO.
Salesforce — signed October 27, 2025, Sabastian Niles, President & Chief Legal Officer.
Signatories verified against the Rome Call site and the Pontifical Academy for Life.
In July 2024, at Hiroshima, 16 new signatories representing 11 world religions signed the Call, in the presence of Microsoft, IBM and Cisco executives, per the Rome Call’s Hiroshima record. The organising partners were the Pontifical Academy for Life, Religions for Peace Japan, the Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace, and the Commission for Interreligious Relations of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. The Hiroshima Appeal and an Addendum on Generative AI were presented.
Track Two: The Astana AI Ethical Code
On 1 April 2026, the ICIID presented a draft “Ethical Code for the Use of Artificial Intelligence” at an international online conference, alongside a document on “The Role of Religions in Combating Climate Change.” Participants came from Kazakhstan, the UK, Russia, Argentina, Thailand, North Macedonia and India. The drafting is confirmed as a “key initiative of the Secretariat” at a 9 April 2026 meeting. The full draft text is not public.
At the 8th Congress, President Tokayev proposed an “Interreligious Commission on AI Ethics” to create, in his words, “commandments for algorithms,” ensuring respect for dignity, non-discrimination and human control, as News Central Asia reported (a single wire source, not independently corroborated here).
Track Three: The Vatican’s RenAIssance Foundation
Created by Pope Francis in April 2021 and based at the Pontifical Academy for Life, the RenAIssance Foundation is the Vatican’s dissemination vehicle for the Rome Call. It is now led by Msgr. Renzo Pegoraro (appointed by Pope Leo XIV in May 2025, per Vatican News), with Fr. Paolo Benanti as Scientific Director.
Key Finding: The Personnel Bridge
Fr. Paolo Benanti is simultaneously the Scientific Director of the Vatican’s RenAIssance Foundation, a professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and a member of the UN’s AI Advisory Body (39 experts, announced October 2023), as the Rome Call notes. He is a clear human bridge between the Vatican’s AI ethics work and the UN’s.
Amandeep Singh Gill, the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology, gave a keynote at Hiroshima, saying the Rome Call “embodies the spirit needed for global AI governance” and is “aligned with the United Nations Secretary General’s efforts to ensure AI governance is global, inclusive, and dedicated to promoting peace and human dignity for all,” per the Hiroshima record.
In 2026, the Pontifical Academy for Life, together with the University for Peace of the United Nations (UPEACE) and the Pontifical Lateran University, issued a call for papers for the AI4Peace 2026 Biennial Global Symposium, to be held 20-22 September 2026 in Rome.
What this means: none of the three AI tracks is binding. None has been transposed into law. Together they represent a convergence that suggests an effort to shape the global norms around AI ethics from a religious and interfaith perspective, before the technology’s governance is settled. Whether that effort will have any measurable effect on legislation or corporate behaviour remains to be seen.
Part Seven: What the Counter-Evidence Shows
An honest investigation must include what cuts against the thesis. The evidence does not support the claim that the religions are being merged, or that a single global religion is being built. The strongest counter-evidence:
No country has adopted Astana’s principles into law. This is a negative finding: a review of the public record found no national legislation transposing the declaration’s principles. The Rome Call is voluntary soft law, not binding legislation.
No concrete 2026 action is traceable to the “spiritual pact” proposed by UNAOC High Representative Miguel Ángel Moratinos in his December 2025 Riyadh remarks (discussed in Part One). Again, this is a negative finding based on a review of the public record.
The syncretism concern is real and unresolved. The Vatican restructured its Assisi gatherings specifically to avoid the appearance of syncretism, per ZENIT, and Orthodox sources have charged that “interfaith dialogue leads to interfaith syncretism.”
Pope Leo XIV has explicitly disavowed erasing differences. In his message to the 2025 Astana Congress, the Pope wrote that “such collaboration is not a call to erase differences, but rather an invitation to embrace diversity as a source of mutual enrichment.” This is the highest-level statement yet that the project’s own leadership rejects doctrinal merger.
The Abrahamic Family House keeps its three houses of worship physically distinct.
IF20 itself says it is informal within the G20 process, not a formal part of it, per its own disclaimer.
Religions for Peace explicitly denies seeking a syncretistic religion.
There is also a naming trap the reader should be aware of: multiple unrelated geopolitical documents share the name “Astana Declaration,” including the China-Central Asia Summit declaration (June 2025) and the SCO Summit declaration (July 2024). This investigation concerns only the interfaith Congress declaration, and conflating them would be an error.
The Dissent Within
The syncretism concern is the strongest, most verifiable internal tension. The 1986 Assisi interfaith gathering drew explicit criticism for syncretism, and the Vatican institutionally responded by restructuring the event so that “each representative of world religions will pray according to his own beliefs,” per ZENIT. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) reportedly said of the event’s framing: “This cannot be the model!”, as the National Catholic Reporter has analysed.
Hardline Orthodox voices have gone further, with some advocating that the Orthodox churches “withdraw from the ecumenical movement, and cease all dialogue with the heterodox” to avoid syncretism, per a theological paper hosted by the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute. (The paper is an institutional document; the specific author and date are not identified in the article’s source.)
Secular and humanist critics raise a different objection: that interfaith dialogue structurally excludes the non-religious. As Humanists International and allied analyses have argued, “the inter-religious dialogue events have excluded the nonreligious, and nontheists including all who identify as humanists, atheists, agnostics, or freethinkers.”
Honest limitation: no named Salafi cleric was found publicly rejecting the Astana process or the Rome Call specifically. The Salafi rejection of interfaith dialogue is documented at the level of theological tendency, but a specific, quotable Salafi rejection of these particular initiatives was not found. This is stated as a gap, not filled with speculation.
Part Eight: The Questions Nobody Is Asking
If the architecture is real but not a conspiracy, the legitimate questions are democratic ones. They are worth stating plainly:
Who asked for this? The interfaith consensus is being translated into policy input, but no direct electoral mandate for these interfaith frameworks has been identified. (Individual institutions, treaties, budgets or memberships may have received ordinary governmental or parliamentary authorisation.)
Who funds it? The Astana Congress is state-established and state-organised by Kazakhstan, but the exact budget is not public. The Zayed Award’s private funders are not confirmed. The RenAIssance Foundation does not disclose its funders.
Who speaks for “the religions”? A small number of overlapping individuals and institutions hold roles that position them as representatives of world religion. Their legitimacy to do so is never tested.
What happens to dissent? The syncretism concern is the strongest internal tension, and it is unresolved. No named Salafi cleric has been found rejecting the Astana process specifically, but the concern is live across Orthodox and traditionalist Catholic circles.
Why AI, and why now? The convergence of the Rome Call, the Astana code and the UN AI Advisory Body suggests an effort to shape AI governance from a religious perspective before it is settled.
Where is the non-religious voice? Interfaith dialogue structurally excludes the non-religious, yet it claims to speak for humanity’s moral consensus.
Who authorised the world’s religions to become a policy input, and who is accountable for what they say?
Part Nine: What Comes Next
The architecture is not static. Several developments are worth watching:
The Roadmap. The 2025 Declaration ordered a Roadmap for implementation. No standalone published document has been found; it appears to be an internal Secretariat working document. The Kozhabay interview (6 August 2026) confirms the direction: conflict prevention, postwar reconciliation, and a possible Islamic-Jewish roundtable in Israel in 2027.
The Online Center of Spiritual Knowledge. Ordered by the 2025 Declaration, no public launch or progress has been found. It remains aspirational.
The 2028 Congress. Confirmed for 2028 in Astana, but no agenda, themes or dates have been announced. The XXIV Secretariat Session is set for 7 October 2026 in Astana, the likely agenda-setting venue.
The 2026 forums. PaRD in Bangkok (10-12 October), IF20 in Salt Lake City (15-17 October), and the AI4Peace symposium in Rome (20-22 September).
The “Global Movement for Peace.” Tokayev’s proposal, reflected in the 2025 Declaration, is framed as a “broad concept” of educational and humanitarian projects, not another international organisation, per the Kozhabay interview.
2003 - First Congress convened by Nazarbayev, post-9/11
2016 - PaRD founded under German BMZ leadership; UK accedes 2017
2019 - HCHF created (Aug); ICIID established by Kazakh Decree No. 226 (Apr)
2020 - Rome Call for AI Ethics launched (Feb); Microsoft, IBM sign
2021 - RenAIssance Foundation created by Pope Francis (Apr)
2023 - Development Concept adopted (Oct 11, XXI Secretariat Session); UN AI Advisory Body announced (Oct); Benanti appointed
2024 - Development Concept implementation/promotion; Hiroshima signing (Jul); Brasília joint forum (Aug)
2025 - 8th Congress + Astana Peace Declaration (Sep); circulated as A/80/425 (Oct); Salesforce signs Rome Call (Oct)
2026 - Astana AI Ethical Code presented (Apr); PaRD Bangkok + IF20 Salt Lake City (Oct); AI4Peace Rome (Sep)
2028 - IX Congress scheduled, Astana
Sources
All claims in this investigation are hyperlinked inline to their sources. The complete list of sources consulted is below, grouped by category.
Primary / Official Documents
Astana Peace Declaration 2025, circulated as UN General Assembly document A/80/425 (UN Digital Library)
Astana Peace Declaration 2025, full text (Congress Secretariat)
2023-2033 Development Concept of the Congress (Congress Secretariat)
International Center for Interfaith and Interreligious Dialogue (ICIID) (Congress Secretariat)
Congress history and triennial schedule (Congress Secretariat)
Pope Leo XIV, Message to the Eighth Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions (Vatican Press Office, 17 September 2025)
Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together (Vatican, 4 February 2019)
International Day of Human Fraternity (United Nations)
Remarks of UNAOC High Representative Miguel Ángel Moratinos, 11th UNAOC Global Forum, Riyadh (December 2025)
UN AI Advisory Body (United Nations)
Interfaith Bodies & Networks
G20 Interfaith Forum (IF20), its about page and collaborating institutions
International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD), its history, UK FCDO membership, IF20 membership, Brasília 2024 forum and 2026 Bangkok forum
UN Agencies & AI Ethics
UNFPA and the UN Interagency Task Force on Religion and Sustainable Development
Rome Call for AI Ethics, its Hiroshima record, RenAIssance Foundation, Benanti UN appointment and AI4Peace 2026