From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between conflict and abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. This important and sure-to-be-controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation toward injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are our own family members, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, scapegoating, and how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to achieve their goals. Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, AIDS historian, and the author of eighteen books. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Sarah is a distinguished professor of the humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Her novels include Rat Bohemia, Empathy, and After Delores. She lives in New York and is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.