Twisted Commutators and Internal Crossed Modules

Abstract

We introduce a notion of relative commutator -- an important special case being commutators twisted by an action -- as a straightforward modification of the definition of the Higgins commutator, establish its relation with a new notion of commutativity -- also obtained as a modification of the usual notion -- and show how we can use it to characterise internal crossed modules in the context of a semi-abelian category.