Sarah  Bentley 

February 9 2011

Ricken Patel is trying to bring governments and businesses to heel around the globe. It’s finger clicking good

If public opinion is the new superpower, is Ricken Patel its prime minister? The 34-year-old Canadian is the founder of one of the world’s biggest online communites, the campaigning network Avaaz (meaning voice in Farsi) which has seven million members. Fashioned in the citizen-politics spirit of MoveOn in the US and 38 Degrees in the UK, it galvanises public opinion online and uses it to influence those with the power to implement change. While MoveOn and 38 Degrees focus on national issues. Patel and the Avaaz faithful want to fix the world.

When I meet Patel at his headquarters in Manhattan he is chewing over the language of acampaign e-mail. His computer pings incessantly with Skype alerts. In the three days I spend with him he takes dozens of calls from his internationally scattered team but also from royalty, diplomats, politicians, activists and non-governmental organisations looking for guidance on how to set up similar projects. Posters from campaigns decorate his officewalls. One urges Robert Mugabe to recognise Morgan Tsvangirai as the winner of the 2008 Zimbabwean election. Another, the campaign Avaaz launched in 2007, shows Tony Blair alongside the caption “Even He Is Pulling Out/Block The Escalation In Iraq”.

Looking up from his computer, Patel explains why the minutiae of messaging is important. “There are two types of fatalism. The belief the world can’t change, and the belief you can’t play a role in changing it. If in a few hundred words you produce a convincing counter-argument, people respond.” The message he is poring over asks for a show of solidarity with the protesters in Egypt who are calling for Hosni Mubarak to step down. A sentence of the rallying call personifies the ethos of Avaaz: “There are moments when history is written not by the powerful, but by the people. This is one of them.”The campaign aims to collect one million signatures and to encourage members around the world to telephone their governments to demand that they support Egyptian citizens’quest for democracy.

The campaign is also seeking donations to pay for satellite internet terminals to thwart attempts to shut down public communication channels.The theory is that such massive attention from the international community will reduce the potential for human rights abuses, encourage other governments to do the right thing and keep open communication channels vital to the democracy movement. “Our goal is to support Egypt’s protesters by showing that the world stands with them,” Patel explains. This kind of rapidly employed, results-focused campaigning has made the pressure group, whose mission is to “Close the gap between the world we have and the world most people want”, one of the most important new voices on the global stage. It has members in all 192 UN countries, including Iran and China where the site is illegal. The UK has just over 500,000 members making it the fifth most “Avaazie” nation after Brazil, France, Germany and the US.

Desmond Tutu, Al Gore and Gordon Brown are fans. Rather than separate politicians into good guys and bad guys it has a policy of “slamming” them when they’re judged to be wrong and supporting them when they’re right. Brown has been on the receiving end of both, yet still praises the group for “driving forward the idealism of the world”. In an era of issue-numbness how did the group earn such eminent cheer leaders and become one of the favourite meeting places for global netizens?

"I think people with compassion and public spiritedness in their hearts were yearning for it,” says Patel, a man described by his employees as a Mr Miyagi character [from The Karate Kid ]. “It’s like we put a call out saying ‘Practical idealists of the world unite’  and they have.”This union claims to have achieved impressive results, including upholding the EU ban on GM crops; preventing the introduction of a law to gag the media in Italy; halting thepassing of a law in Uganda that would sentence homosexuals to death; stopping the international whale-hunting ban from being overturned; helping Iranians to access news by keeping banned internet sites live during the 2009 election; pushing through a law in Brazil to block politicians convicted of corruption from running for office, and by passing the Burmese Government’s block on international aid after Cyclone Nargis by depositing $2 million (£1.25 million) in donations in the account of a local businessman to pass to the monks running the relief effort. “In terms of numbers of lives saved, that’s one of my favourite campaigns,” says Patel. These victories, and most people whether they lean to right or left would regard them assuch, have been achieved by collating monumental petitions (with vast numbers of signatures) and then dropping them into the inboxes of their targets. If this doesn’t work the organisation stages sit-ins, rallies, phone-ins and media friendly stunts such as taking a herd of cardboard pigs to the doors of the World Health Organisation to demand an investigation into the link between swine flu and giant pig farms. It also created a three mile human chain handshake from the Dalai Lama to the doors of the Chinese Embassy in London to request dialogue between the parties. If such genteel acts are ignored, campaigns are honed into hard-hitting adverts on billboards, TV channels and in newspapers. Patel assures me that such bare-knuckle tactics are employed only when an individual or organisation refuses to negotiate. For example, when the Hilton hotel group apparently failed to act on a petition requesting that it introduce a scheme to help staff identify guests trapped in the sex trade, it was given four days to come good, otherwise adverts high lighting its inaction would be run in the chief executive’s hometown newspaper. Hilton signed up. Some might see this as blackmail but for others it’s an efficient way of forcing corporations to put people before profit and is the quintessence of the group’s “the world in action” motto.“Hotels are ground zero for the rape trade,” says Patel. “Now 80,000 eyes and ears [Hilton employees] will be trained to spot it. I’m not going to lose any sleep over how that was achieved.”  

Not all parties come on side so smoothly. Last year Avaaz tangled with the Canadian broadcaster Sun TV over its licensing application to launch a news channel that would have to be included in all cable and satellite packages. Avaaz raised concerns that it would be a conduit for the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, and was receiving preferential treatment because Kory Teneycke, the channel’s development vice-president, was Harper’s former communications director. Sun threatened legal action and ran articles in its newspapers claiming that Avaaz was a George Soros-backed interest group meddling in Canadian affairs. The mud-slinging came to a head in a live TV debate.

Patel has probably been preparing for this role all his life. Born in Edmonton, Canada, to a Russian-English mother and a South African-born Indian father it’s no surprise his affinity is with a global rather than national idea of citizenship. Aged 3, he knew about the Cold War and the structure of the human cell and by 6 was striking up conversations about colonialism. He went to school on a Native Indian Reservation where he endured bullying but, having read about the communities’ plight, claims to have felt empathy with his persecutors. “I’ve always felt solidarity with people suffering injustice,” he says. “My theory is that my Mum gave me so much love I’ve always had extra to give.”He went to Oxford to study PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) and it’s there that his passion for activism was born. He played a central role in the 1998 tuition fee protests, drafting an alternative graduate tax plan. At Harvard, where he took his Masters in Public Policy, he joined the living wage campaign for the institute’s workers, a formative experience that saw the first on-campus occupations since 1969 and gained support from national press, local congressmen and even the wife of the president of the University. For four years he worked in war torn nations such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and Afghanistan. He lived locally with families rather than in expat compounds and says that through jobs for the International Crisis Group he learnt how to bring rebel forces to the negotiation table, to monitor elections (covertly), to restore public faith in once corrupt political systems and to spot when foreign forces were being manipulated. After returning to the US he volunteered for MoveOn, which was voicing opposition to the Bush administration’s attempt to marry support of war to the Patriot Act. Through this experience he grasped the power of organising public opinion online. His travels had already convinced him nations were more united than divided on the issues that really mattered, and so his idea for a global advocacy citizenship was born. Despite campaigning against and witnessing the shortfalls of the institutions of formal politics, Patel has never lost faith in them. If the UN council were an elected body he’d be“excited” to run for a seat and he regards Black Block and other disaffected youth libertarian movements that use violence to express disenchantment with the status quo as tragic.“Refusing to engage in politics declares victory to all the unscrupulous forces trying to use it for their own ends,” he says. His mission appears to be to reform the present system into an injustice-free, alpha version of itself. But if the path to this utopian land is to be laid by governments, why choose advocacy over politics? “There’s massive consensus on human rights, poverty, corruption, the environment and finding diplomatic ends for war. What’s lacking is political will to implement these things. The only way to achieve that will is if a global community pushes for it.” So if that community is Avaaz, does that make you the prime minister of the new superpower of public opinion? He looks aghast. “No, more like its steward.”