The International Journal for Religious Freedom (IJRF)

This special issue has been a long time coming and I am very pleased to present it to you. It was initially conceived as a joint project of the Gender and Religious Freedom Task Group (GRF) and the Research Group of the Religious Liberty Partnership (RLP). We recognized that the special concerns of children and youth in FoRB were under-researched. But of course, that was also what made developing such an issue for this journal so hard – where do we find authors willing to break new ground in research?

We planned a one-day seminar following the annual RLP consultation, scheduled for April 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. The consultation was quickly moved to Warsaw, Poland when Russia invaded Ukraine. But our seminar was delayed until the 2023 consultation in Kathmandu, Nepal. So you will see some unusually long lead times between submission dates and acceptance dates of articles in this issue. It’s all due to the unanticipated ways in which global events interfered with our work.

Although we are calling this a special issue, not all the articles focus on children and youth. And some of the articles focus on issues faced by a broader range of people, not only youth.