Frequently Asked Questions

End Infighting is a project to help end infighting among advocates for progressive causes. The project includes webinars, in-person workshops, written materials, and a comprehensive website, infighting.org.

Infighting is not the same as in-disagreeing. Infighting is basically the same as “outfighting”—any form of fighting—except that it’s directed toward members of one’s own group. Generally, people fight when they have differing opinions or needs and use force or aggression to influence or change the other person. Infighting reflects nonrelational, toxic, ways of communicating and leads to divisiveness and unnecessary harm. 

Disagreements about various issues, from philosophy to strategy to values, are essential for creating a diverse, thoughtful, robust, and impactful group or movement. Some of these disagreements are particularly important—such as when women, BIPOC, or LGBTQ+ people challenge imbalances or abuses of power.

We need to be careful not to label healthy challenges that contribute to a movement’s evolution as “infighting,” as this could weaponize the concept and silence critical voices.

Infighting is more about the “how” than the “what”; it’s communicating in ways that are nonrelational and that cause unnecessary harm. That said, it’s essential to acknowledge the importance of addressing issues such as abuses of power, even if the concerns are not communicated in an ideal manner.

Melanie Joy has written about these issues in several of her books, and they are addressed throughout this website. 

How to End Injustice Everywhere is not meant to provide “the” solution to ending injustice but to offer a way to support myriad other solutions. The book focuses on the process—the “how”—of injustice, rather than on the content: who is oppressing or abusing whom.

As Melanie writes in the preface: 

This book is not meant to be a primer on ending injustice, nor is it meant to oversimplify what is clearly a complex problem. There are many excellent books and other tools covering a wide array of issues related to the subject that examine injustice from multiple perspectives. This book is meant to be a complement to other works, providing what I hope will be additional insights and tools.

It’s also not meant to explain what kinds of strategies, tactics, campaigns, or other types of actions are appropriate to help end injustice. There are plenty of great materials on those topics, which have been produced by highly experienced advocates and organizers.

I wrote this book because I believe that a missing link in the existing literature on progressive social change is an understanding of the psychological—most notably, the relational—drivers of injustice. And I believe that illuminating these drivers, and how they are expressed through our interactions and relationships, can help hasten our efforts to create a more just world. In other words, I am suggesting not that injustice isn’t a deeply entrenched, institutionalized reality that is maintained by powerful social structures, but rather that examining these structures through a relational lens can help deepen our understanding of unjust dynamics and support our efforts to change them.