What does it mean to truly forgive and when is it morally right to do so? In this essay, Luke Russell examines the remarkable case of Abdirashid Abdi, a refugee who forgave his attacker and advocated for her leniency. Russell challenges our assumptions about justice, asks whether forgiveness can coexist with punishment, if compassion might sometimes carry risks and what role victims play in shaping the moral landscape of accountability.

"If Ahmed’s sources of killjoy inspiration dislodge a reader’s sense of the most important feminist thinkers, all the better."

"Violence cannot be understood only through the gesture of the blow, but equally through the systemic suffering that permeates our lives."

"While interdependency is a great fact, it does not actually tell us very much about what we are to do with it."

This semester, I gave my students a confounding assignment. I asked them to write a “non-representative representation” of a community to...

Image © William Eckersley To be is to be recognized, Hegel argued. And the reason, by his thinking, was not so much psychological as...

The feeling that something is wrong with our way of life has been around for a while – even among those who profit from it. Now, school...

"There are lots of ways in which women have a much better situation than we did once. But equally there are ways in which it is much worse."