I asked Dr. Stephen Bailey how much of his work in Laos could transfer to another country. He was blunt.

“It really depends.”

Dr. Bailey is IGE’s Laos Program Officer and has spent the better part of three decades in and around the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. If anyone were positioned to hand me a playbook to use in other contexts, it would be him. What he offered instead was an in-depth stakeholder table mapping relationships—relationships with the government, with civil society leaders, with the media, with local religious leaders. And he gave me the insight that his work moves at the speed those relationships allow.

That is not a modest answer. It is a claim about the nature of the problem.

Which is why a standard playbook for religious freedom promotion cannot be written.

No one can write a comprehensive playbook for advancing religious freedom in a given country. A serious program requires a region-by-region, country-by-country, culture-by-culture, and group-by-group approach—and the reason is not merely that countries differ. It is that religion resists the kind of abstract approach on which policy guidance depends.

Religion is a category that touches on everything people do. For most, it is their deepest-held belief, expressed both individually and collectively at once—in what a person prays alone and in what a community does together. An approach or framework for human rights that captures either the group or individual tends to lose the other. Most human rights can be described in terms of what a state must refrain from doing. Religious freedom cannot be fully described that way, because the state is not the only actor capable of destroying it.

Every Level, or None

The government matters, the civil society leaders matter, the media matters, the local groups and religious leaders matter. Not only do these institutions hold inherent and differing postures toward religion, the individuals inside them do, too. A government branch or task force is not a position. It is a room full of people, each with their own view of their neighbors, and their own way of engaging with religion.

Freedom of religion may advance at one of these levels while stalling at every other. If the government accepts religious freedom, yet local villages will tear down alternative-faith family homes, nothing has been done.

This has a name here. Dennis Hoover, in launching Portico’s covenantal pluralism series, described the goal as a combination of “top-down” and “bottom-up” conditions: a legal framework protecting free exercise and equal treatment, and “a supportive cultural context of respectful engagement, relationship, and reciprocity.” Neither half works alone. Dennis Petri has since shown, in these same pages, how badly most empirical metrics of international religious freedom miss the bottom half. National indices can register a country as stable while particular provinces deteriorate, and the actors doing the most damage are often ones no state-centric framework was built to see. Petri’s conclusion is that we should measure more contextually. My conclusion runs alongside it. The reason those realities resist measurement is the same reason they resist a playbook: both are attempts to reach the particular with a general instrument.

IGE’s own record in Laos illustrates both the difficulty and what progress actually looks like. Since the late 1990s, the organization has convened government and religious leaders at the provincial and district levels—and by IGE’s account, local officials at these seminars are frequently encountering their own country’s constitutional and policy protections for religious minorities for the first time. Many arrive assuming the Lao government sponsors Buddhism. It does not. In March 2019, IGE and the Lao Ministry of Home Affairs co-convened the country’s first national conference on religion and the rule of law, with delegates from every province.

The detail that stays with me is a smaller one. During one seminar, a security official apologized to a local religious group for having threatened to arrest them for gathering.

No statute produced that. No report produced it. A man, an individual, sat in a room, understood something he had not understood the day before, and said so out loud to the people he had frightened. You cannot legislate that moment, and you cannot schedule it. You can only build the conditions in which it becomes possible—and then wait, sometimes for years.

What Relational Diplomacy Is, and What It Is Not

So if the guide cannot be written, what exactly is relational diplomacy?

It is a definition and a mindset to hold while approaching, nothing more. And the “nothing more” is not a deficiency.

The definition is roughly this: durable change in how a society treats belief comes through relationships built patiently, at every level, without transactional intent—with governments, with religious communities, and with the particular people inside both. That is a conviction about where change comes from. It is not an instruction.

Chris Seiple, who named the practice, put it more precisely fourteen years ago. “Whether your spouse, a village leader, or a foreign ambassador,” he wrote, “there is always a way to develop an authentic relationship, one in which you have earned the right and responsibility to speak with honesty and grace.” Note the significance of this. The relationship is not the goal. The standing to speak honestly is the goal, and the relationship is how you earn it.

IGE’s principles of engagement, developed by Bob and Margaret Ann Seiple and Chris Seiple, are of the same kind. Know your own faith well enough to hold it honestly, and your neighbor’s well enough to respect it. Understand your own weaknesses and how they land on other people. Know the history, political and cultural, theirs and yours. Find partners who have proven trustworthy, and build relationships that endure. Practice patience.

Read that list again and notice what is absent. Not one of those is a step. Every one of them is a way of arriving. They tell you what to carry into the room and nothing about what to do once the door closes—because what to do next depends on the province, the official, the grievance, the decade, and the man in front of you. IGE’s approach is rooted in knowing, and getting to know.

This is where the temptation lies, and it should be resisted. The moment a mindset is converted into a procedure, it stops being true, because a procedure has to be about a specific location. And location does not transfer.

There is a coherence here that is easy to miss. An organization arguing that people should be seen as individuals rather than as categories cannot, without contradicting itself, treat the officials and religious leaders it engages with as instances of a type. But a playbook is precisely a machine for treating people as types—that is what makes it efficient, and that is what makes it useless here. The absence of a playbook is not a gap in the method.

It is the method.

Track 2—and Track 1.5—Relational Diplomacy

There is a serious objection to diplomacy that leans heavily on a relational approach, and it is being made right now by people who spent their careers doing human rights work inside the government.

When the State Department dissolved its human rights bureaucracy into the regional desks, former officials from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor warned that the move would gut the work. Officers at country desks and embassies, they argued, “generally accommodate the views of those governments, which generally resent criticism of their human rights records.” The overriding imperative is to smooth relations. Human rights concerns become, in their phrase, “bilateral irritants.”

That is an argument against relational diplomacy. It says proximity purchases silence—that the closer you get to a government, the less you will ever tell it.

I think the critique is potentially right about states and wrong about IGE, and the difference is structural. A country desk has a bilateral, Track 1 relationship it is institutionally required to protect, and candor is a cost charged against its core mission. An organization like IGE, by contrast, operates in a less formal and more dynamic Track 2 and Track 1.5 space. It has no arms sale to smooth, no state visit to schedule, no bilateral file to keep clean. This is what Seiple’s formulation is for: the relationship exists to earn the right and responsibility to speak with honesty and grace. A relationship that cannot survive honesty was transactional all along.

The security official in Laos is what it looks like when this works. A man apologizing to people he had threatened is not what accommodation produces.

Relational diplomacy is a transformational method, but it can’t be rushed. It is a process of cultivating a sustainable environment of religious freedom, one relationship at a time.