Ricken Patel is a fellow of ResPublica and an organiser of the CeasefireCampaign. Anthony Barnett, editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, talks to him.
Anthony Barnett: How successful has the “ceasefire campaign” been compared to other international petitions, to your knowledge?
Ricken Patel: There have been a few massive international petitions that were mainly off the internet, such as Oxfam's Make Trade Fair petition, or the Control Arms petition, which got millions of signatures on paper at mostly community meetings in the global south. But for a global internet petition where people sign up with their email address, the record that I'm aware of is the 911 Peace petition, launched just after the World Trade Center attack, which reached 515,000. While we're still short of that, the speed at which we grew (250,000 signatures in a little over five days) is unprecedented, to my knowledge.
Anthony Barnett: How international has it been so far? Do you have figures yet on the proportions from different countries, how many came from the middle east, and from Israel and Lebanon in particular?
Ricken Patel: It's a good spread across countries. The top ten countries are all Europe, Canada/US and Australia/New Zealand. But Brazil, Mexico and India follow close behind. About 5,000 Lebanese and 1,000 Israelis have signed the petition, and these numbers are growing fast. We've been struggling with the technology of getting Hebrew and Arabic petitions up, but I think it would help a lot.
Anthony Barnett: Was it also a financial success, did many people send financial support? How will you report on it if they did?
Ricken Patel: Only about $20,000 has been donated, but that's just through a passive button on the site. Online fundraising usually requires a specific email with a compelling ask, so I don't think we've fully tested yet whether folks are willing to give money as well as time to this effort. Based on the level of engagement and emails and volunteers we're getting, I think it's a safe bet that strong fundraising is only an email away. We report back to all donors by email how we spend the money, and what we accomplished with it.
Anthony Barnett: What are you planning to do now? It is hardly the case that a true peace has broken out in the middle east.
Ricken Patel: I think the next steps are:
1) watch this process, and make sure that a ceasefire on paper becomes a ceasefire in practice
2) look at how this solution might become sustainable, through addressing some of the root causes of regional instability in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process and the tensions between Iran and the US.
Anthony Barnett: Campaigns like these are ways of people reaching a common agreement, but there are profound disagreements on these issues; won’t this condemn such movements to superficiality?
Ricken Patel: I don't think so. As a fan of openDemocracy, I'm a huge believer that democratic politics can be both inclusive and transformative. I think there's a significant democratic deficit in the world today, by which I mean that the views of values of the vast majority of people do not shape the policies that govern them. In addition, there is a lot of research to show that conversation among people with different perspectives tends to generate more convergence than conflict, and a movement of the whole towards a better outcome. The value of petitions like these is that they are nodes of interaction for a global community, a community that is having a democratic conversation that is increasingly changing the world in meaningful ways.
