Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

Conflict's publication could not be timelier ... A sharply observant and relevant text that is already getting its wish for action granted. -Lambda Literary

With awesome brilliance and insight, Sarah Schulman offers readers new strategies to intervene on all relations of domination both personal and political. The core of this book provides ways to think and move beyond blaming and/or assuming victimhood -- so that each of us may come to understand the role we assume in creating and sustaining conflicts in all our relations. Sharing myriad ways, critical vigilance can help us all understand that conflict need not be viewed as abuse, that essential distinctions may be made between the hurt we experience in conflict and the violence of abuse, Schulman offers a vision of mutual recognition and accountability that liberates. -bell hooks

It's impossible to be invested in the world and not be invested in this groundbreaking and challenging book. From a position of artist and social critic, Sarah Schulman gives us a detailed and considered reading of some of our most overly determined and venomous conflicts. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a book to interrogate, ponder, and discuss. -Claudia Rankine

Conflict is Not Abuse should prove to be essential reading for people interested in psychology, group dynamics, and social justice activism. -Global Comment

A compelling call out of call-out culture and everything that it messily dredges up, brings forward, and shunts away. -Canadian Art

Schulman's book could not have come at a better time ... Conflict is a balm against comforting explanations for violence and abuse, ones we know aren't true, just easy. -Village Voice

Schulman's new work is a provocative rethinking of intimate and civil discourse for a rapidly shrinking world ... a rallying cry for civil engagement and engaged civility. -Gay City News

Conflict Is Not Abuse presents a gestalt shift in thinking about conflict, power relations, harm and social responsibility. -The Globe and Mail

The book offers readers a clarifying lens through which to consider the fraught encounters of our era of discontent: between police and protesters; between writers and their readers; between colleagues, neighbors, and friends. -New York Magazine