112| book review 'honour' killing and violence: theory, policy and practice Edited by Aisha K. Gill, Carolyn Strange and Karl Roberts, Palgrave Macmillan, London and New york, 2014, 272pp., ISBN: 978-1-1372-8954-4, £70.00 (Hbk) In a compact but powerful-and powerfully useful-book, Gill, Strange and Roberts have provided a compelling lens through which to broaden how policymakers, advocates, service providers, media and various publics around the world define, understand and respond to the global challenge of honour-based violence. The text begins with the problem of language and definition crippling understanding and responses to honour crimes in various countries. George Orwell famously wrote in 1984 that an idea (and in turn a feeling or a belief) cannot exist without the word for it. The editors and authors of 'Honour' Killing and Violence: Theory, Policy and Practice start from a different place: that, in a world in which societies, economies and values systems are intermingling and converging so intensively, even a single word can contain many ideas and beliefs. Not only do the authors show us how 'honour' means different things to different people, families and societies, they also explain that it is undergirded by and embedded in value systems that see themselves as vastly different from each other. What this means, the authors demonstrate, is that any legal framework that seeks to dismantle values systems that use honour as a justification for committing systemic violence-and to replace it with a new, global framework-must develop a simultaneously universal and specific definition of 'honour-based violence'. The book's first order of business, therefore, is to dismantle assumptions about honour and honour-based violence, and to redefine the term in such a way that enables us to view honour- based violence as part of gender-based violence generally. In turn, we may then view different types of gender-based violence as stemming from patriarchal systems of honour that exist in communities of many ethnicities, nationalities and culture. Thus, the book disentangles the reality of honour-based violence from narrow, often Islamophobic efforts to respond to such crimes. The book also includes a carefully curated set of case studies and policy approaches illuminating different ways that countries have either allowed or limited violence in the name of honour, and how activists have or have not succeeded in raising public awareness or influencing policy. While these are useful tools for practitioners and advocates, who are presumably the target audience of this book, the conceptual framing of the text and the analysis of the various provisions lay fertile ground for future work. When we can Instagram from the top of Kilimanjaro or tweet from the pounding heart of an anti- authoritarian uprising, the very notion of 'remote' seems to be a quaint relic of an older time. And yet, many media analysts have pointed out that media coverage of honour killings in the United States, "Honor Killings: Tradition and Law, In the Media, http://sites. tufts.edu/anth27h/in-the-media/ [last accessed 13 November 2015]. (e8-e10) @ 2016 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/16 www.feminist-review.com feminist review 112 2016
Canada (Vatandoost, 2012)