by Noah Raford
These experiences of policy and elite failure were some of the experiences which led me to start organizing with new, people-powered networks and movements over the last half-decade. These movements and other “white hat Multitudes” will be described further in the final part of this essay.
One last piece of the Conflicts Forum story deserves to be shared, because it is, in some ways, the most telling. It concerns the path-finding and world-defining role of norms, values, and political identity and community, all of which are crucial if we are to take white hat action to scale. I was surprised to find myself having a couple of remarkable and wide-ranging conversations with Alastair Crooke about social values and the failings of Western capitalist modernity—and particularly about postmodern philosophy and the counter-globalization “movement of movements”—things I had some familiarity with. I discovered that these were topics that both Crooke and the Islamist movements were intensely interested in.
These conversations were stimulating, but they were also deeply disturbing for me. In my view, Crooke and movements like Hezbollah were placing existential “resistance” at the heart of their political narrative. They were attracted by the overlap with the stories told both by the radical vanguard of the “No Global” movement and by European philosophers from the generation of 1968.8 But it had already become clear to me from my experience with those communities that resistance, when elevated to this existential level, becomes an emotionally narcotic dead end. The harder and more worthwhile task is building a better society.
I agreed with Crooke that there were powerful positive social traditions in Islam. But we found ourselves disagreeing on other points, for example, his views of Iran seemed to me sometimes to risk slipping toward idealization of that curious state and the political networks that have colonized it—and in a way that appeared to me naïve for someone of his background (although I should emphasize that these perceptions, reflections, and experiences are my own, presented here as illustration, rather than as the final word).
Another white hat, T. E. Lawrence, travelled a long way to find his tribe. Still, I believe that if you are a true white hat, all states and power centers deserve challenge and scrutiny, without exception.
A full exploration of white hat ethics is a topic for another time. But when you are up against a black hat adversary, it is all too easy to find yourself mirroring his or her cynicism or practices. During this period, Ron Suskind described a conversation he had with an (anonymous) prominent Bush administration figure, later reputed to be Karl Rove.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” He continued, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”9
Compare this neoconservative doctrine10 to Crooke’s own words about the Lebanese Shi’ite political Islam movement, Hezbollah, with whom he seems to have worked closely.
Hezbullah is using techniques that stand outside of the usual repertoire of western politics in order to transform Muslims.… Hezbullah is using myth, archetypal narrative and symbolism to explode the Cartesian severance between subject and object, and between objective reality, on the one hand, and fantasy, make-believe and superstition on the other. Hezbullah uses these means to re-ignite creative imagination. The opening of this intermediary layer in Cartesian dualism allows people to begin imagining themselves in a new way; and by imagining themselves differently, to begin to act differently. As they begin to imagine themes differently and act differently, the way they see the world about them changes also.11
Both these descriptions are, in a strict sense, accurate. But I do not think that we could call them right. The actions of the U.S. administration or Hezbollah can dramatically alter social realities, as can the actions of the white hats described in this essay. Such change can be good or bad.
But what is most striking in both the quotes above, to my mind, is the way they seem to affirm a kind of manipulative approach and a denial or denigration of the underlying realities: human hopes, human suffering, human lives.
What would a genuine ethos of democratic white hat transformation look and feel like?
The White Hat Multitudes
On February 15, 2003, tens of millions of people marched in eight hundred cities around the world to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. It was the biggest international march ever, and the marches in individual cities broke national records in much of Europe.
The Iraq marches prompted many (including UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, and the New York Times) to call global public opinion a second superpower. The street demonstrations were backed up by Pew Center polling showing large majorities against the war in most—though not all—countries. This “second superpower” failed, almost inevitably, to influence the U.S. decision. Yet many now reflect that those who marched were right to question the rush to war and the failure to respect international legitimacy.
The march was not a spontaneous event. It was midwifed in part through transnational conversations in circles linked to the European Social Forum and similar meetings in Porto Alegre and Cairo. The organizers included a rainbow of representatives of their societies, but almost nowhere did the demonstrations also oppose Saddam Hussein’s crimes against his innocent citizens or present any positive alternative agenda. Still, February 15, 2003 was a network-centric and locally rooted mobilization that, for one day, channeled and gave thunderous voice to the will of a global multitude.
In London, the Observer newspaper wrote, “[As well as the] usual suspects—CND, Socialist Workers Party, the anarchists.… There were nuns. Toddlers. Women barristers. The Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women’s Choir and Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice).”
The white hat multitude was on the march.
At the end of the day, however, the multitude went home. What’s more, a few days later, with the invasion of Iraq, the multitude watched its own defeat live on television. Many of those who marched felt disenchanted and demobilized. More hardened radicals filled the vacuum and captured the banner of the peace movement, often to its detriment. Countless others started channeling their energies in new directions. And a few people started doing lessons learned.
The growth of the white hat multitude is not just about marches or petitions. It’s a process with many aspects, from neighborhoods to the global public square. Part of it is about attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Part of it is about social capital. And part of it is about social infrastructure and the networks that connect us.
A year after the February 15 marches, individuals and small groups scattered around the world started to think hard about organizing infrastructure and narratives. Over time, we began to think, talk, and write about an internet-enabled movement that could become a rapid-response arm for the second superpower and a civil counterforce to the clash of civilizations. I was one of those people, as were the founders of the Australian movement GetUp and Eli Pariser, who had raised a huge global petition for a law-based response to 9/11. We had all become increasingly convinced that a global movement for direct, mass citizen action was a crucial part of the answer to the global challenges we faced. So in 2007, we launched Avaaz, which means “voice,” “noise,” or “people’s song” in many languages.
But the momentum for what became Avaaz was generated overwhelmingly by three extraordinary white hats who had come together in an organization called Res Publica: Tom P
erriello, later a U.S. congressman for Virginia; Tom Pravda, who has had a stellar career in the British Diplomatic Service; and, most of all, Ricken Patel, who became Avaaz’s main founder and executive director.
As this book was in production, the Avaaz network had close to forty million members, and it is still growing fast. These citizens are taking action together through the internet across a dizzying range of global and national issues. Avaaz has members in every country of the world. Two of its largest national constituencies are now burgeoning in Brazil and India, southern democracies where its members have recently run mass national anticorruption campaigns.
The Avaaz movement, like the wider white hat multitude, is still in its infancy. So I will share just a handful of episodes from its first few years, in the hope that they may illuminate the potential of civil society coming together and becoming a more decisive actor for resilience and transformation.
In late 2007, a motley cast of characters arrived at a house on a hilltop a few miles outside Granada in Spain. Some had never seen each other face-to-face. These were the organizers of Avaaz, and we had planned to be strategizing for the long-term development of our movement. But as it turned out, we had more important things to do. Thousands of monks and hundreds of thousands of citizens had taken to the streets of Burma in antigovernment protests, and a campaign was going viral across the internet. So we descended en masse on the nearest internet café and got to work.
That campaign received over eighty thousand signatures. It was delivered to UN Security Council members, and its message was spread via a full-page advertisement in the Financial Times and in private meetings with diplomats. It was followed up with thousands of messages sent by citizens of the European Union, Singapore, and India, pressing their own governments to act, and with a global day of action organized through Facebook and global trade union and NGO networks. Avaaz members also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to help break the communications blackout in Burma, providing vital equipment and other support to hard-pressed civil-society movements there.
But the story didn’t end there. Perhaps its most important chapter was still to come. The following May, Cyclone Nargis hit the huge Irrawaddy Delta in Burma, killing tens of thousands of people and devastating communities. The government was very slow to accept aid, and there were multiple problems over the following weeks getting official and NGO aid supplies and workers into the country.
By contrast, within twenty-four hours, Avaaz were in touch, via Burmese counterparts, with networks of monasteries and community-based organizations across the delta. We established that we could get funds into the country directly through the hundi money transfer system, which carries huge volumes and is used by the diaspora for remittances and by businessmen for payments, to defray payments for community-based relief and reconstruction that urgently needed to begin. Within days, Avaaz members had donated more than $2 million to these locally sourced and community-based efforts—a greater contribution than the government of France made, channeled in faster, with less obstruction, and to more reliable destinations.
Another interesting moment in the history of Avaaz came at the Bali conference on climate change in 2007, where Avaaz mobilized a full-spectrum campaign of petition signatures, phone calls, and Titanic-themed advertisements to personally target the leaders of the three most obstructive countries, Japan, Canada, and the United States, in the final seventy-two hours. Japan and Canada folded, leaving the United States isolated to be browbeaten into agreement by the delegate from Papua New Guinea.
In the heat of the moment, we were not sure just how much impact our members’ pressure had in this process. But a couple weeks later, we received an email from one of our Japanese members with a scan of a full spread from the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second biggest newspaper. The article told the tale of Japan’s “Bali Shock.” In a vivid scene, it described the environment minister putting a newspaper down on the cabinet table in front of the prime minister, telling him that this was how Japan was being seen in the world and that a change of policy was needed. The newspaper was the Jakarta Post, and on the back page was Avaaz’s Titanic advertisement. That advertisement achieved iconic status in some circles in Japan and later made its way onto the wall of the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Japan.
It should by now be clear even to the skeptical reader that we are not talking about a banal and misleading stereotype of “clicktivism.” Avaaz became one of the backbones of the global movement on climate change by 2009. It ran dozens of national and global campaigns on climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, including an election campaign in Germany that engaged the leaders of the main parties personally. Its members organized thousands of flash mobs and vigils globally, culminating in a vigil inside the Copenhagen summit addressed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a mass global telephone conference with British prime minister Gordon Brown, a plethora of rapid-response campaigns targeted at the main dramas of that summit, and the delivery of millions of petition signatures.
Copenhagen fell short of the “real deal” Avaaz and NGOs had been calling for, but as one member said in an email, “the elephant is moving.” Avaaz’s membership has exploded since then, and other social campaigns are gathering momentum all around the world.
It may be worth sharing one more sequence of stories from Avaaz’s campaigning, as it connects to the other white hat stories discussed above. Early on, we created a short YouTube video called “Stop the Clash of Civilizations,” designed to give voice and hope to everyone who felt unrepresented by the two sides in the terror wars or who resented how it had dominated headlines and imaginations for so long. “Stop the Clash” shows the misperceptions, manipulation, and ventriloquism at the heart of this false conflict. It asks whether Arab strongmen and the leaders of the G8 really speak for us as global citizens, and it outlines an alternative agenda of people power rising up to change flawed policies, change misperceptions, and transform our world for the better.
“Stop the Clash” was watched by millions of people around the world in several languages, including Arabic. It was voted “Best Political Video of 2007” by YouTube users, beating the much-touted “Obama Girl.” For a time, it was the second most discussed video ever on YouTube, and it became the basis of conversations with policy makers and opinion makers in the United States and the Middle East. It is now used as a teaching material in many schools around the world.
Perhaps most importantly, “Stop the Clash” helped set an agenda for white hat movement building and campaigning over the following years. Avaaz’s contributions to this process have included the deliberative promotion of a peace plan for Iraq based on negotiations, empowerment, legitimacy, and withdrawal; pressure for a comprehensive Gaza ceasefire; and an Indian social resilience viral after the Mumbai bombings, signed by a Muslim Bollywood actress, which carried the message “don’t let them divide us.”
Recently, with me long gone, Avaaz has campaigned intensively in support of the Arab Awakening. Its most significant practical intervention here is probably the tens of thousands of donations that have been channeled into support for Arab civil society within weeks, including smart-phones, satellite communications, training, and connections to the global media.
Controversy was also sparked over Avaaz’s involvement in the botched smuggling of British journalist Paul Conroy out of Syria. The operation was led by Free Syrian Army networks, and activists died in it. Ricken Patel’s public version of this story can be found on the Avaaz website, although there may be aspects which cannot be openly discussed to this day for reasons of safety, as is often the case in conflict zones.12
Strikingly, for an organization with a history of questioning imperial adventurism, Avaaz also delivered almost a million messages of support to the UN Security Council for a no-fly zone over Libya, after polling its membership and receiving an overwhelming majority of support. Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, publicly welcomed this campaign.
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It is probably too early to tell, on balance, what the net consequences of this work have been, in a turbulent and complex time of transition. But Avaaz’s Libya decision, made by a mass membership, was, in my view, a significant milestone in the evolution of the white hat multitude. Avaaz uses a continuous model of participatory-democratic accountability and steering to make sure it stays close to its members. Regardless of their views today on the Libyan intervention, they are certainly committed to the civilian-led transformation of the Middle East.
Avaaz is now an institution as well. Because of its openness to and complete dependence on its membership, its future success is more dependent than that of most institutions on trust and a growing practice of open accountability. The contrasts between Avaaz and a project such as Wikileaks should be clear. I will not venture to suggest what color Julian Assange’s hat is, although I have met him. Many of his interventions seem to have contributed considerably to the public good. But it seems to me that his operating method at Wikileaks may have been closer to that of the warlord entrepreneur. Nor is Avaaz a vehicle for anarchic swarms like those of Anonymous. More Avaaz members are businesspeople and parents than hackers and students, and that is much of its strength.
In the Middle East today—and in many other regions—social norms and means of organization are being transformed. The ideas, identities, and social technologies that facilitate self-organization through networks are spreading. So are open-source strategies of popular struggle articulated by white hats like Gene Sharp (the supposed éminence grise of nonviolent conflict), the Serbian resistance movement OTPOR, and others—who have themselves become the subjects of sharp controversy.13
Charismatic individual leaders like former Google executive Wael Ghonim, who created the Facebook network that prepared the ground for the Egyptian revolution of 2011, are important in these processes, as is clear from his autobiography; but they are also fragile and perilous sources of legitimacy and hope.14
