Abstract
In Empathy and resistance, Kristina Lunz, a feminist and human rights activist, articulates a political and structural understanding of empathy. She argues that empathy, when decoupled from resistance to injustice, is not only insufficient but can actively undermine efforts toward creating a fairer and less violent society. Empathy, as Lunz asserts, can become selective, exclusionary, and even complicit in oppression unless anchored in universal human rights, nonviolence, and sustained attention to power relations. Weaving together autobiographical reflection, political critique, and portraits of women peacebuilders who embody both empathy and resistance, Lunz situates contemporary feminism and its backlash within intersecting structures of authoritarianism, racism, militarism, and democratic erosion. As a result, she offers a moral compass grounded in individual and collective responsibility, openness to difference, principled solidarity, and firm boundaries against oppression.
The book’s most impressive quality is the integrity that permeates the text. Lunz, together with the peacebuilders and activists she profiles, demonstrates a consistency between awareness and action, coupled with a reflexive engagement with privilege that is expressed through responsibility, cooperation, and the sharing of resources. These commitments are translated into sustained efforts to challenge structural oppression, often at considerable personal cost. The book does not shy away from acknowledging the threats, online harassment, and vilification that many of these women have faced. It is precisely this palpable conviction in action — despite fear, frustration, and hostility — that imbues the book with credibility and motivates readers to move beyond reflection toward engagement.
Another strength of the book lies in its conceptual clarification of empathy. Empathy is commonly understood as an interpersonal skill exercised primarily at the micro level. While empathy is foundational to human interaction, this narrow framing of the concept risks isolating empathy from the broader systems of power and oppression in which suffering is produced. Lunz challenges this limitation by demonstrating through concrete examples that empathy also operates at structural and collective levels, shaping policy decisions, public narratives, and societal responses to harm. She resists idealizing empathy, showing how it can reinforce in-group and out-group distinctions and reproduce the very injustices feminism seeks to dismantle. By unsettling the assumption that empathy is inherently virtuous, the book provides concepts that enable readers to reflect more critically on the entanglements of individual suffering, systemic inequality, and shared responsibility.
The book is also notable for its nuanced representation of women and thoughtful engagement with questions of privilege. Drawing on women from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and from different social positions, Lunz illustrates how they critically reflect on their own privilege and consciously mobilize it for social change. Many of the women featured did not begin from positions of power; rather, their awareness of relative advantage enables them to act in solidarity with others and to challenge structural oppression. In this way, the book offers a compelling response to longstanding critiques of feminist movements concerning exclusion and inadequate representation. Lunz presents women peacebuilders and activists as exemplars of empathy and resistance, illustrating how awareness of privilege and relational commitment support more inclusive forms of change. This extends the book’s resonance for readers across varied cultural contexts.
Despite these strengths, the book also has limitations. One is its implicit tendency to privilege outcomes over process. Lunz frequently foregrounds achievements such as policy influence, legal reforms, media accountability, and institutional recognition, while offering limited insight into how these outcomes were negotiated, contested, or sustained over time. This relative inattention to process sits in tension with her own insistence that progressive change is complex, relational, time-consuming, and resistant to simplified narratives. Given the book’s scope and length, the emphasis on outcomes is understandable. Nonetheless, the sustained focus on success stories risks presenting an overly linear account of social change — one that underplays uncertainty, setbacks, unintended consequences, and the emotional labor inherent in such processes.
From an academic standpoint, the book offers limited new theoretical insight. Its central claims — that empathy is morally ambivalent, must be coupled with resistance, and that feminist politics should be intersectional and inclusive — are well established within feminist theory, critical peace studies, and social work scholarship informed by human rights traditions. While Lunz’s synthesis enhances the book’s accessibility and practical appeal, the text neither develops new conceptual models of empathy, resistance, and social change nor engages extensively with debates that might have added greater analytic depth.
As Lunz notes in the book’s closing, her aim is to provide “stimulation, conceptual clarity, and confidence” (p. 118). Although Empathy and resistance is not written specifically for social workers, Lunz’s book would clearly achieve her stated aims in relation to practicing social workers if they read this text. The book suggests that ethical practice requires setting boundaries, challenging injustice, and resisting harmful systems, while remaining grounded in empathy. For social work education, it reframes empathy and resistance as inseparable and central to the profession’s commitments to social justice and human rights, regardless of practice specialization. Beyond the classroom, the book functions as an ethical companion for practitioners navigating emotionally and politically constrained contexts, helping to carry forward value-oriented action amid uncertainty and pressure. Finally, by foregrounding the voices of women from diverse cultural and social backgrounds, the book presents a vision of solidarity and responsibility that resonates strongly with social work values in an increasingly polarized modern world.
