Honour based violence (HBV) and oppression is a contested academic and political field situated at and constructed through multiple borders, boundaries and intersections: nation, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, migration, to mention a few. In the Nordic countries, where HBV has been disputed as a severe social and political problem since the mid 1990s, mainstream discourse has it as a distinctively dangerous form of violence, linked to religion, migration and culturally specific notions of honor, and not least to the failure to ‘assimilate’ to Nordic ideals of gender equality. As such, HBV plays right into the hands of nationalist politics, racist agendas, and segregation.

This paper takes as point of departure the very borderline status of honor-based violence as a simultaneously lived everyday reality and racist stereotype. It interrogates the multiple modes of inequalities produced by its borderland status, and, in turn, the inequalities produced. The aim is to develop a theory of honor based violence to better explain its character and prevalence.

The material is gathered via a qualitative and a quantitative study. The quantitative study comprises a survey of 6000 year nine pupils in Swedish metropolitan areas. The qualitative study is based on interviews with 235 identified key persons; people with knowledge about the problem from their: a) professional position, b) personal experience of, and c) from both professional and personal experiences.

The preliminary findings show that two main mechanisms of exclusion, inclusion, isolation and segregation influence the character and prevalence of HBV. The paper develops these mechanisms as enclosure and mobility on three levels where honour is understood as a position (individual level), organisation (group level) and institution (societal level).

Sofia Strid is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies. Her research departs from feminist social theory and focuses on intersectional gender based violence, violence as a post-disciplinary research field, and violence regimes. She is the Co-Director of GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies and a board member of the Nordic Association for Women’s and Gender Studies.

Her current projects are Violence Regimes (2018-2021), funded by the Swedish Research Council, brings together research from multiple disciplines to empirically and theoretically examine if and how the institutionalisation and production of violence in a given territory co-vary as to constitute a regime of violence, and how such regimes translate into (gender) welfare state regimes.

Rúna í Baianstovu, PhD
Senior lecturer in Social work
School of Law, Psychology and Social Work
Örebro University, Sweden
Runa.Baianstovu@oru.se

The paper could fit into any of the streams dealing with intersections, inequalities and border regimes, but would very much benefit from a new panel on violence, which I feel is missing.

Other than that, great work!

BEst
Sofia