Pushing Back
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Al-Tadafuʿ · Issue 1 · September 2026

One Law, Many Fields

Damascene-style mosaic: red and orange arrows push from the right, blue and green from the left, with an eight-pointed star holding them in balance
Mosaic in the Damascene manner: two forces pushing against each other, the eight-pointed star holding the balance.
Editorial

Why a Magazine for a Single Law?

Pushing back is not one subject among the subjects of human society; it is the law through which all of them move. This magazine is an attempt to read scattered fields through a single lens.

  1. Mosaic balance with level scales among coloured eight-pointed stars
    Foundations

    Pushing Back, Not Wiping Out: The Limits of the Concept

    Between pushing back, conflict and annihilation lie fine distinctions, and when they are lost the meaning of the law is lost with them. This article defines the term before the articles that follow carry it into the field.

  2. Open sea with a wave breaking in white foam on the shore
    Society

    The Foam and What Benefits People: Ideas Pushing Back in Society

    Societies do not change by decree but through a long contention among customs, ideas and groups. What remains in the end is not the loudest but the most beneficial.

  3. A digital camera screen showing an old photographer under a black hood behind a wooden bellows camera
    Economics

    When the Market Pushes Back: Creative Destruction and Its Limits

    Competition is the most effective tool humans have found for stopping a producer from capturing the consumer. But it carries within it a tendency to abolish itself.

  4. An artificial intelligence processor chip surrounded by memory chips on a circuit board
    Technology

    The New Iron: Technology Between Might and Benefit

    Every new tool shifts the balance of pushing back, because it multiplies the strength of whoever owns it. The question is not whether we own technology, but who owns it and to what end.

  5. Charcoal drawing of eight justices in black robes on the court bench, with a ninth seat empty
    Politics

    So That Power Checks Power: Pushing Back in the Structure of Government

    The most successful political systems are not those that abolish the struggle for power but those that turn it into an organised contest in which each power is checked by another.

  6. Painting of a long line of voters with umbrellas in the rain outside a lit polling station
    Elections

    The Absent Vote Pushes Nothing: Pushing Back at the Ballot Box

    In electoral systems only those who show up are counted. A community that boycotts the ballot box does not leave the contest; it lets it be decided by others, and against itself.

  7. The flags of the Soviet Union and the United States side by side, lightly folded, pressing against each other where they meet
    Military

    “To Deter Thereby”: Deterrence as Pushing Back That Prevents War

    The highest function of military power is not to be used. Deterrence is pushing back that achieves its aim when swords stay in their sheaths.