A/HRC/28/66 opportunities may be higher. There are societies in which the voices of fanaticism resonate strongly and in some countries they have even managed to infiltrate important parts of the State apparatus or to lead the Government. 27. One main factor, which typically makes larger groups of people receptive to messages of religious extremism, is a general loss of trust in public institutions. What often starts with endemic corruption and political cronyism may end up in a total disenchantment with State politics by large parts of the population. However, if people have lost any trust in the fair functioning of public institutions, they will try to manage their lives by resorting to their own support networks. Frequently, such networks are defined along ethnic or religious lines. 28. When overarching public institutions lose their credibility, groupings defined by ethnic and/or religious loyalties at the same time gain more importance. Such fragmentation processes typically produce inward-looking mentalities, collective anxieties and attitudes of general suspicion against everything happening outside of the boundaries of one’s own group. Where the willingness to trust people is gradually shrinking to an internal circle, collective narrow-mindedness will be a likely consequence. In this situation, polarizing apocalyptic religious messages may become “attractive” since they actually seem to match the mind-set of people who feel that they live under siege in a hostile and dangerous political environment. Everyday anxieties and militant religious messages may thus blend into each other. 29. In such a precarious constellation, a sudden crisis such as an incident or even mere rumours can easily ignite mass-scale violence, including atrocious acts of barbarism justified in the name of religion. Owing to the lack of trustworthy overarching public institutions, political hysteria may set in and further poison the relationship between competing communities. The end result of this vicious cycle can be a climate of political paranoia in which militarized groups fight each other by using all available means, including religious condemnation and demonization. Militarized group identities defined along religious lines and dichotomized religious worldviews can thus reinforce each other. 30. The absence of trustworthy public institutions often goes together with a decline of public communication. If negative rumours remain unchecked by any counter-evidence that could be presented and discussed in public discourses, they may harden into fully-fledged conspiracy projections. In such situations, apocalyptic images and violent messages, which can be found within different religious traditions, may provide interpretative patterns for assessing contemporary anxieties, thereby becoming an additional factor of violent escalation. 3. Policies of exclusion 31. While many of the most extreme acts of violence in the name of religion currently occur in the context of failing or failed States, State agencies can also be directly involved in violent sectarian polarization. This is often the case where the State understands itself as the guardian of one particular religion. If this is compounded with an “official” or State religion, the negative impact on people belonging to religious minorities tends to be even worse. Whereas the followers of the protected religion(s) usually receive a privileged treatment, adherents to other religions or beliefs may suffer serious discrimination, such as underrepresentation in public employment, exclusion from higher education or even deprivation of citizenship. The experience of systematic exclusion almost inevitably leads to divisiveness within the society. 32. Policies of exclusion in the field of religion exist under different auspices. On the one hand, there are a number of Governments that base their legitimacy on their role as guardians of certain religious truth claims. Those people who do not adhere to the protected 8