Conflict is Not Abuse: Reflections on everyday abolitionism

I’ve been reading Sarah Shulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair.

As the title suggests, she is helping us nuance and complexify and slow down the conflation that can happen so quickly between conflict and abuse.

I feel relieved as I’m digging into her work.

I see this conflation happening all around me - in interpersonal relationships in my own communities, in cancel culture, all the way out to the fractals of international relations (read: the escalations of genocide and “war” we see unfolding around our planet).

Shulman explores how accusations of harm commonly get dramatically and rapidly inflated, effectively removing the possibility of accountability and repair.

I’m struck that this inflation/conflation, this inability to stay in centered accountability and acknowledge our part in a conflict (even when we have perhaps experienced some harm and at least discomfort ourselves), is a symptom of a cultural wound.

In most communities, we are long-severed from any form of community/cultural practice around conflict and repair.

We simply don’t have adequate tools, skills, support or modeling to move towards conflict in generative ways.

And it’s important to remember that although there is always personal responsibility, this is in many ways a cultural/collective failing, and therefore, something we need to [re]learn together.

I read this text as an abolitionist manifesto, as she speaks not only to interpersonal relationships, but also to policing, to various forms of criminalization, and to the violence of so-called nation states.

When we don’t have the tools to move through conflict ourselves, we’re more likely to turn to the police, to rely on external authority and systems of domination.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can bring our abolitionism into the everyday, into tangible practices we can grasp onto and be in together now.

This is my personal commitment, and this longing is very much why so much of my work in the world is around supporting folks to find tools and skills and spaces to move through conflict with more hope that it might be generative.

Being in more collaborative feedback practices, and growing the possibility for more collaborative feedback culture as the norm, is foundational in abolitionist work.

The more we can normalize being in short and frequent cycles of clear, compassionate and timely feedback, the more we can tend tensions as they arise instead of letting them fester.

I’ll say it: growing our collaborative feedback superpowers is necessary to move away from what I see as this highly normalized conflation of conflict as abuse.

Conflict is not abuse. Conflict is a normal, healthy, necessary part of human relationship and transformation.

It’s ok that for most of us, it doesn’t feel that way right now. That makes sense.

And, it’s totally possible to grow our tools and skills so we can show up more resourced to the conflicts in our lives.

Will you join me in Navigating Feedback: Deepening Collaboration in the Conversations We Need as we do just this? Or one of my many other offers of support around conflict and healing?