Gender Violence And The Transnational Politics Of The Honor Crime

A transnational feminist examination of how gender-based violence known as the "honor crime" is intertwined with larger political and nationalist agendas that regulate belonging.

How can we understand and contest the global wave of violence against women? In this book, Alison Brysk shows that gender violence across countries tends to change as countries develop and liberalize, but not in the ways that we might predict. She shows how liberalizing authoritarian countries and transitional democracies may experience more shifting patterns and greater levels of violence than less developed and democratic countries, due to changes and uncertainties in economic and political structures. Accordingly, Brysk analyzes the experience of semi-liberal, developing countries at the frontiers of globalization--Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, the Philippines, and Turkey--to map out patterns of gender violence and what can be done to change those patterns. As the book shows, gender violence is not static, nor can it be attributed to culture or individual pathology--rather it varies across a continuum that tracks economic, political, and social change. While a combination of international action, law, public policy, civil society mobilization, and changes in social values work to decrease gender violence, Brysk assesses the potential, limits, and balance of these measures. Brysk shows that a human rights approach is necessary but not sufficient to address gender violence, and that insights from feminist and development approaches are essential.

The Cunning of Gender Violence focuses on how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, along with the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Because religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run so deeply through the institutional structures of the agenda, the contributions explore ways it may be affirming or enabling rationales and systems of power, including civilizational hierarchies, that harm the very people it seeks to protect. Contributors. Lila Abu-Lughod, Nina Berman, Inderpal Grewal, Rema Hammami, Janet R. Jakobsen, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Vasuki Nesiah, Samira Shackle, Sima Shakhsari, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Dina M Siddiqi, Shahla Talebi, Leti Volpp, Rafia Zakaria

In conflict zones from Iraq and Afghanistan to Guatemala and Somalia, the rules of war are changing dramatically. Distinctions between battlefield and home, soldier and civilian, state security and domestic security are breaking down. In this especially timely book, a powerful group of international authors doing feminist research brings the highly gendered and racialized dimensions of these changes into sharp relief. In essays on nationalism, the political economy of conflict, and the politics of asylum, they investigate what happens when the body, household, nation, state, and economy become sites at which violence is invoked against people. In particular, these hard-hitting essays move us forward in our understanding of violence against women—how it is perpetrated, survived, and resisted. They explore the gendered politics of ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka, the post-Yugoslav states, and Israel and Palestine. They consider "honor killings" in Iraqi Kurdistan, armed conflict in the Sudan, and geographies of violence in Ghana. This volume augments feminist analysis on conflict zones and contributes to transnational coalition-building and feminist organizing.

Recent human rights campaigns against sex trafficking have focused on individual victims, treating trafficking as a criminal aberration in an otherwise just economic order. In Economies of Violence Jennifer Suchland directly critiques these explanations and approaches, as they obscure the reality that trafficking is symptomatic of complex economic and social dynamics and the economies of violence that sustain them. Examining United Nations proceedings on women's rights issues, government and NGO anti-trafficking policies, and campaigns by feminist activists, Suchland contends that trafficking must be understood not solely as a criminal, gendered, and sexualized phenomenon, but as operating within global systems of precarious labor, neoliberalism, and the transition from socialist to capitalist economies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. In shifting the focus away from individual victims, and by underscoring trafficking's economic and social causes, Suchland provides a foundation for building more robust methods for combatting human trafficking.

Just a few years ago, most Russian citizens did not recognize the notion of domestic violence or acknowledge that such a problem existed. Today, after years of local and international pressure to combat violence against women, things have changed dramatically. Gender Violence in Russia examines why and how this shift occurred—and why there has been no similar reform on other gender violence issues such as rape, sexual assault, or human trafficking. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Janet Elise Johnson analyzes media coverage and survey data to explain why some interventions succeed while others fail. She describes the local-global dynamics between a range of international actors, from feminist activists to national governments, and an equally diverse set of Russian organizations and institutions.

This examination of the European Union and efforts to combat violence against women provides an empirical feminist analysis of the transnational strategies and processes that connect global and grassroots advocacy efforts. It looks beyond policy rhetoric to examine the extent to which this important human rights issue is being addressed.

Violence and Gender in the Globalized World expands the critical picture of gender and violence in the age of globalization by introducing a variety of uncommonly discussed geo-political sites and dynamics. The volume hosts methodologically and disciplinarily diverse contributions from around the world, discussing various contexts including Chechnya, Germany, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Syria, South Africa, the United States, and the Internet. Bringing together scholars’ and activists’ historicized and site-specific perspectives, this book bridges the gap between theory and practice concerning violence, gender, and agency. In this revised and updated edition, the scope of inquiry is expanded to incorporate phenomena that have recently come to the forefront of public and scholarly scrutiny, such as Internet-based discourses of violence, female suicide bombers, and the Islamic State’s violence against women. At the same time, new data and developments are brought to bear on earlier discussions of violence against women across the globe in order to bring them fully up to date. With an international team of contributors, comprising eminent scholars, activists and policy-makers, this volume will be of interest to anyone conducting research in the areas of gender and sexuality, human rights, cultural studies, law, sociology, political science, history, post-colonialism and colonialism, anthropology, philosophy and religion.