The Coloniality of Contemporary Human Rights Discourses on ‘Honour’ in and Around the United Nations

Abstract

In United Nations (UN) human rights reporting and analysis, ‘honour’ has been systematically conflated with ‘honour-related violence’ (HRV). However, honour and HRV are not the same thing. In this article I examine contemporary UN human rights discourses around honour. I argue that these discourses are underpinned by racialised and orientalist-colonial imaginaries which falsely categorise people and places as either having or not having honour. This conflation presents honour as a cultural problem attributed to racialised communities mostly associated with the Muslim World. Adopting a critical post- and de-colonial perspective, I undertake a discourse analysis of UN human rights documents to expose orientalist tropes that reproduce epistemic and material violence against honour.