Honor Crimes: A Question of Honor, Culture, and Humanity

Honor crimes, femicide, domestic abuse and violence are widely prevalent in patriarchal societies. Middle Eastern cultures deeply value protecting the chastity and honor of women. The traditional images of women and the notions of honor and shame are consistently used as justifications for violence and killings. This is not attributable to a single culture or religion. It is rather a manifestation of societal norms around gender-based violence. Feminist activism against honor crimes in the Middle East within the last decade has increasingly received social media attention. However, the impact of this social media activism on government intervention has yet to be evaluated. Existing literature has primarily focused on textual analysis of honor crimes and the construction of gender patriarchy. Consequently, the relationship between honor crimes and actual government intervention has been relatively unexamined. This thesis will offer a critical analysis of the presumptions behind honor crimes, while also incorporating a comparative study between case studies of recent honor killings in the Levant region, and the effects of these impactful honor crimes. This paper draws on social media posts and case study analyses to examine Arab news’ discourse, discourse of the international community, and the political implications of online activism against honor crimes and the sociopolitical effects it has in the Middle East. It analyzes social media responses of the Arab community towards three honor crimes that happened within 2017 to 2020 and compares it to the responses of the international community by conducting discourse analysis in addition to qualitative critical discourse and content analysis

The shape of Arab feminism on Facebook

Much has been said about the influence of Western culture on social movements worldwide, and this claimed influence has caused some to accuse Arabic feminism of being merely an alien import to the Arab world. New waves of feminism have arisen as a reaction to the claimed prevalent western culture. Global Feminism argues that women worldwide experience similar subjugation in many social constructs because many cultures are based on a patriarchal past, but other waves reject the concept of a universal women's experience and stresses the significance of diversity in women's experiences and see their activities as transnational rather than global. Others expect that the confrontation of secular and Islamist paradigms will dominate. Social Media has global reach, and there are signs that Facebook pages are used by feminists worldwide to boost their social and political activism. Facebook gives public pages' owners the ability to associate their pages with pages with similar ideologies. This provides a global space where feminist pages are clustered and exposes clues about their patterns of influence. By crawling Arabic feminist pages over Facebook, this paper builds a dataset that can be analysed using social network analysis tools and reveals the map of influence between Arabic feminist network and the western, transnational, and Global feminist networks. The map shows that Arabic womens pages are clustered in two segments: Arab feminism, and Sect feminism. The later consists of pages which distance themselves from associating with 'secular' feminism pages whether they are Arabic or not, and in contrary to the former, they are less likely to restrict themselves with national Identity