Violent nuclear collisions are open systems which require a non-equilibrium description when the process should be followed from the first instants. The heated system produced in the collision, can no more be treated within an independent-particle picture and additional correlations should be taken into account: they rely to in-medium dissipation and phase-space fluctuations. Their interplay with the one-body collective behaviour activates the transport dynamics: large-amplitude fluctuations and bifurcations in a variety of mechanisms appear, from fusion to neck formation till eventually freezing out the system into several intermediate-mass clusters. Starting from fundamental concepts tested on nuclear matter, a microscopic description is built up to address violent processes occurring in heavy-ion collisions at Fermi energies and in spallation reactions, and it is applied to experimental observables.
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