Peter Mandaville and Shadi Hamid, both experts in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at Brookings, discuss their new paper, "Islam as statecraft: How governments use religion in foreign policy." Their research focuses largely on how both Saudi Arabia and Iran employ Islam as a soft power tool in the conduct of their foreign policy, and also touches on case studies including Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, and Indonesia. Also in this episode, demographer Bill Frey, a Metropolitan Policy Program senior fellow, discusses new U.S. Census Bureau data on the declining U.S. population growth rate. Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on iTunes, send feedback email to
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