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Friends,
Underneath the intense and loud notes of chaos — executive orders and trade wars, the continuing scapegoating of trans people and immigrants — the low hum of war is always with us. 

Too many people are experiencing these wars firsthand – Palestinians, and also people in Ukraine and Russia, in Sudan and the Congo, in Afghanistan and Myanmar, in over 100 ongoing armed conflicts happening right now.

War: It has no aim. It is destruction for destruction’s sake. It abandons the imagination. It does not die down into embers until people stop throwing bodies – their own bodies and the bodies of others – as fuel. War does not go out completely until the imagination is reopened by peace and our connections with each other.
What is war, what do we do about it in all its forms, including the wars within us?

This is the fifth* in a series of episodes on How To Live in 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. In other words, tools that don’t merely deaden us in the frantic pursuit of survival, but that assist us in nourishing ourselves, each other, and the world, all together.

The theme is PEACEKEEP
and my guest is ⁠CHEYNEY RYAN⁠.

Cheyney works with ⁠The Oxford Consortium for Human Rights⁠. He’s a a researcher; professor; founder of the Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict at Oxford; and author, most recently, of the excellent book, ⁠Pacifism as War Abolitionism⁠ and also of ⁠The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility⁠, as well as many articles on peace activism, pacifism, Marxism, and nonviolent action (⁠you can find links to plenty of them here⁠).

PEACEKEEP was a word I had to invent for the show because we have such an undeveloped language of peace. While the lexicon of war is extensive, the act of creating true peace in the world doesn’t exist in an active word. 
That is in part because the war system – as Cheyney calls the autonomous, seemingly inexorable network of war activities, sites, motivations, and contracts – has instead on the articulation of its own anatomy. It’s entranced us into detailing its every contour so that we become more and more convinced of its reality and density.

In Pacifism as War Abolitionism, Cheney writes “Non-violence is not just the refusal to engage in the killing of war. It aims to fashion a new form of power that gives full expression to human agency, rather than rendering such agency, a tool for powers on autonomous purposes.”

On this episode, Cheyney and I work on how to think about non-violence and the war system, and move towards the expansion of a language of peace.

Stay on after the episode for the exercise.

Peace!
CH