Pause for Peace - Global People Power

Pause for Peace Flyer and FAQ (below)

“It is essential to build momentum through a sequence of tactics that increasingly build pressure on people that uphold the status quo whilst protecting the participants as much as possible. This often means starting from safer actions that bring in more and more supporters and then escalating the action once large and diverse constituencies have become involved. That approach makes movements more resilient in the face of government repression while consistently disrupting the opponent's rule.” - Dr. Erica Chenoweth Civil Resistance

Flyer front page

The world is teetering on the edge of WW3 due to the horror taking place in the Middle East and Ukraine. As a result, climate breakdown is being both ignored and massively exacerbated. The potential for our annihilation is more real than we dare to admit.

But what can you and I do about it? How, simply, safely and swiftly can people everywhere drive ”world leaders” and extremist governments to put an end to their conflicts? How can we force all nations to cooperate to tackle threats to all life on earth? What can we do to evidence to each other and the world that we care about each other, that we won’t take any more insane killing, corruption and criminal inaction any more?

We can do nothing, together, for 1 minute every day.

Pause for Peace, daily. 11am local time, globally. Stop. Outside your home. At work. In school. For one potent minute, stand in silent solemnity.

Demands:

Ceasefire NOW (Hostages released by Hamas and Israel)
Citizens’ Peace Assemblies (CPAs) between warring nations, not high-level “peace talks”
National Preferenda votes on CPA’s Peace Proposals

If our demands are not met then, when we begin to sense our collective power, with safety and strength in numbers (3.5% of the population in one nation is critical mass), we’ll escalate our action in scope and intensity until each and every government acts accordingly. In defiance of those who use division as a weapon, in recognition of our unity in diversity, our love of life and our shared humanity we will assume local to global responsibility. So please, join us. Join me. You are far more powerful than you realise. You are the remedy!

Flyer back page

Bold: It can feel awkward and slightly intimidating taking a stand, even by doing nothing in public for one minute. People will stare. Breathe into it. How does it feel to take a minute out of life? Think of all the people suffering at the hands of war mongers around the world. You are a pioneer. People will join you and you will be part of history.

Communal: Film or photograph and share your Pause for Peace on social media to create a storm. #PauseForPeace daily. 11am globally. Find others who are pausing too and make friends with them.

Accelerating: SET YOUR ALARM FOR 10.55AM EVERY DAY. Pausing daily will build the unstoppable momentum necessary to achieve our demands or to overthrow those who deny us our right to life.

Ingenious: Create a ‘Pause for Peace placard to hold up. Add to it how you wish. Be your own creative genius.

Systemic: Tell the world why you want to live in a world where solutions to threats to all life on earth are decided by we-the-people, not by those who, without conflict, become irrelevant.

Enigmatic: Silent action is hard to stereotype and be dismissed by the media. This helps build a broad-based movement capable of gaining defections from the pillars of support of corrupt political-economic-military systems.

Cosmopolitan: Become an Earth Citizen and sign our Accountability Agreement - to attempt to find common ground with those whom you might normally disagree with or be in conflict with.

FAQ'S

Inspiration for the action was taken from the Clap for Carers social movement involving millions of people in nations all over the world during COVID-19 lock-downs.

The Pause for Peace action was not undertaken on a whim but is strategic and has hugely ambitious goals not only to tackle the immediate symptoms of wars being waged around the world but also the systemic root causes of interrelated threats to all life on earth.

Erica Chenoweth. (Civil Resistance). “Predictability is as ineffective on the streets as it is on the battlefield.”

War is potentially more immediately threatening to all life on earth than ecological issues are. War is also found to be considerably more emotive, disgusting and immediately terrifying to more people than climate breakdown currently is. This is evidenced by the huge protests taking place all over the world against Israel's bombardment and collective punishment of people in Gaza. War and economic crashes have a negative effect on both public and government focus on ecological issues.

Conflict elicits strong reactions and active mobilisation from a broad representation of the global social makeup.

Climate breakdown and war have the same root causes, the systemic corruption of democratic systems by oligarchic power (oil, media, weapons, banking), authoritarian regimes, and both governance systems' weapon to maintain power, International Divide-and-Rule (IDR).

War and climate breakdown therefore have the same systemic solution. If Citizens' Peace Assemblies were convened to overcome the conflict between Israeli and Palestinian people, between Russia and Ukraine or between any warring parties around the world then a mass global movement for them to tackle the root causes of all threats to life on earth would become mobilised.

The horrors Hamas committed against the people in Israel do not warrant the murder and collective punishment of millions of Palestinian people. Collective punishment and ethnic cleansing is an international war crime.

War in the Middle East could easily spread into the wider region drawing in powerful opposing forces from around the world, e.g. Iran, Russia, China vs Israel and NATO resulting in a global conflict in which nuclear weapons are used.

It is highly unlikely leaders of extremist governments of both Israel and Gaza will welcome peace talks, nor trust that the other would attend such talks in good faith. Leaders of extremist or authoritarian governments become irrelevant without conflict. Unsuccessful peace talks can deepen conflicts.

Authoritarian or extremist leaders and governments require the threat of conflict (often with historic precedence) to maintain their power and influence in exactly the same way as the world’s largest military-industrial complexes need the threat of authoritarian or extremist leaders and governments to maintain theirs.

Just as Israel helped fund the creation of Hamas in order to sow division in Palestine and subvert Palestinians' hope for statehood, the US also helped fund many extremist groups around the world for their own geo-political ends. The term “blow-back” describes how geo-political subterfuge causes problems for the nations instigating it, especially for the citizens of those instigator nations. For those invested in arms sales, blow-back represents an opportunity. War also fortunes politicians with flagging careers or those who are up for corruption charges. This is known as the “rally round the flag effect.”

Citizens Assemblies are a proven democratic and legitimate way of finding solutions to break political deadlock over highly complex issues with many competing interests.

Sortition is the process of involving randomly selected individuals reflective of the social makeup of the local, national or global citizenry in the lawmaking process. Just like politicians, citizens don’t need to be experts on any issue they preside over but, during the Citizens’ Assembly process, they will become experts - experts making decisions whilst being free of party political influence, career aspirations and funding corruption.

Citizens’ Peace Assemblies would be made up of a cross-section of societies of citizens of competing warring nations.

Ukraine suggested that it would hold referenda votes on peace negotiations with Russia. We propose a better way.

Binary, yes/no votes contribute to yet another form of division in a complex world. Governments of warring nations should each set up a national preferendum vote, a more nuanced, non-binary, and less divisive referendum, to allow citizens to vote on the implementation of a variety of proposals put forward by the Citizens’ Peace Assembly. The preferendum is a smart tool that can satisfy all camps.

Global People Power’s Strategy 2023-25

We are not cynically using the tragedy taking place in Palestine and Israel to forward a political agenda. The conflict taking place is part of a wider problem which we aim to tackle, namely the systemic corruption of national governments, a lack of local to global democratic participation and the weaponisation of division as a tool of oligarchs and corrupt leaders to maintain and expand their power and influence.

Global People Power Strategy 1 Pager

Global People Power Strategy 2023-25 Long