We offer you, our valued readers, the inaugural issue of The Irenaut, a magazine devoted to understanding peace as an active principle, an energy, rather than a state to be defined in contradistinction to conflict or war. With academic articles, essays, stories, poems, we begin the exciting work of exploring peace as an irenic force. Our first outing focuses on how peace overcomes violence, its prime disruptor.

In the essay, “Searching for an Irenic Force” in this issue, I define the force as that which renews by an effort of continual creative jeopardy the connection between the arche of our work and its inherent goal of human amelioration. It is—we see it all around us— always operative, like electromagnetism or gravitation. Whereas for all its horrors, for all that it warps the structures of human interaction, violence is not a force in itself but a disruption of human flourishing. It signals the temporary blocking of our irenic energy.

This has a felicitous corollary: intelligent peacebuilding should look first at the reasons why the irenic force gets obstructed. It must start with work in its most fundamental form: the work of learning, which precedes and accompanies all other forms. I was delighted to find echoes of this among some contributing authors, who draw on their own or others’ experience of building peace from below, eschewing the architect of Lagado’s method (building down from the roof!).

Our first issue looks obliquely or directly at different forms of violence and peace. Our authors and poets will speak for themselves, but I’d like to say a word about our cover artwork. When Leonardo da Vinci enclosed Vitruvius’ sketch within a circle and a square, placing humanity, as Pico della Mirandola had done, at the centre of the renaissance cosmos, he bound us in the celestial and the earthly domains respectively. Our cover artwork parlays this idea into sphere and cube. Pico says, in the Oration on the Dignity of Man, that humanity is at the centre of the universe: we partake of all natures; having no decreed place, we must choose one. A choice that remains always provisional.

In this sense, humans are never complete, always becoming. Our artist sees the violent contortions required by any attempt to foist upon us a spiritual or material completeness. Such efforts would entail imprisoning us—language creatures that we are—in definitions. In the mind of humans who choose violence, their victims are made falsely whole, defined for ends they have not themselves chosen. As we prepare this first issue, armed conflicts are spilling blood in four out of our seven continents.

The victims on all sides have, as usual and for a long time, been carefully defined: How else could we bring ourselves to kill someone, how else even try to justify the act to ourselves and others, without first purging the human creature of everything except what makes them our enemy?

It would be a mistake for The Irenaut to address the specific horrors of conflicts in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere. We are a quarterly publication and cannot keep current, fast-moving events in focus. Nevertheless, we intend to do more than talk about peace and conflict. The more accurately we describe the irenic force, the better people will be able to recognise it in all its manifestations, nurture those burgeonings, and make them stronger than the violence that would crush out their life.

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Our next issue will ask vital questions: Are humans worthwhile, despite all the pain, violence, and destruction we cause to ourselves, other lifeforms, and the planet? Can we make a convincing case—an anthropodicy—for the human species? We shall be publishing a call for contributions soon.

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We welcome letters from readers of our first issue, and a selection will appear in our next edition.