Alain Renaut is emeritus professor of political philosophy and ethics at the Sorbonne. He is also director of the Centre International de Philosophie Politique Appliquée.
Geoffroy Lauvau is a teacher of the first higher education at the Bellepierre high school in Saint-Denis de la Réunion.
September 11, 2001: the collapse of the Twin Towers puts an end to the hope for peace born with the fall of Communism. The world is once again torn apart, but war is no longer a reference model. The violence associated with ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual behavior, and with social differences, is at work on a local, regional, and sometimes global scale.

With the concept of conflictualization, G. Lauvau and A. Renaut attempt to make sense of the process by which the chasms that traverse human societies engender an entire range of forms of conflict, from representations to speech and to discriminatory actions, then to violence, going as far as genocide.

A paradox: it is on this extreme form of conflict, a source of unsustainable violence, that this work focuses in order to understand the new conflictuality. Excluding the other from “true” humanity is the fundamental mechanism. It is at work in genocide, in jihadism, as well as in mass rapes or social violence, starting at less severe stages.

How can the human being be saved from inhumanity? This is the question, the guiding light in this fascinating work.