Doctoral Dissertation Research: Contesting Jurisdictions: A Comparative Study of State Responses to Honor Killings in Turkey and Israel

Michael W. McCann和Ceren Belge， 0617531。题目：“管辖权之争：土耳其和以色列国家对荣誉谋杀的反应比较研究”。荣誉谋杀是有预谋地谋杀那些被认为性行为不检点的妇女。直到最近，土耳其法院还经常为那些杀害女性家庭成员以“保护”家族荣誉的人减刑。相比之下，在以色列，法院驳回了与荣誉有关的辩护，但犯罪者通常会得到总统的赦免，警察很少保护妇女免受家人的伤害。虽然荣誉谋杀绝不是少数民族的专利，但在以色列和土耳其，这种行为在库尔德人和阿拉伯少数民族中似乎发生得不成比例。这个项目探讨了为什么土耳其和以色列在少数民族中与男性主导的社会组织达成了如此令人费解的和解，同时拒绝了他们对“政治”自治的要求。它还问道，为什么这种反应最近开始发生变化。该项目的研究将在土耳其（迪亚巴克尔和桑留尔法）和以色列（拿撒勒和海法）两个少数民族人口众多的城市，以及安卡拉、伊斯坦布尔、耶路撒冷和特拉维夫等城市进行。数据的主要来源是法院判决和对执法官员、少数民族妇女组织成员、维权律师和高等法院法官的深入访谈。为了确定男性主导的社会组织的适应程度和性质，法院对荣誉杀人的判决将进行比较和跨时间的分析。对执法官员的采访将揭示导致他们要么接受地方自治，要么采取措施改变地方做法的担忧。对维权律师和妇女团体成员的采访将揭示，他们与少数族裔精英和政府官员之间的立场，是否影响了他们成功地改变执法官员和少数族裔在性别问题上的隐性共识。该项目有望提高我们对以下问题的理解：为什么在种族分裂的社会中，国家有时会容忍少数群体内部的歧视性做法，以及为什么在其他时候，它们会积极干预以改变这种做法。尽管学者们从规范的角度对多元文化主义对妇女权利的影响进行了广泛的辩论，但很少有人从经验上研究国家可能代表少数民族妇女干预地方权力领域的条件。这个项目将探讨法律是如何被主流社会的文化价值观和少数群体的抵制同时塑造的。它将通过确定不同的国家-少数民族关系模式和少数民族妇女的法律动员战略是否会导致不同程度的迁就，从而促进社会法律思想。该项目对种族分裂社会的比较关注有望丰富对法律制度在不同社会政治背景下如何运作的理解。该项目的研究结果将为决策者和人权界就处理种族分裂社会中妇女权利的战略提供坚实的基础，其相关性将超越学术界。它将提出创造性的法律解决办法，以解决社区自治与妇女人权之间的紧张关系。

Michael W. McCann and Ceren Belge. 0617531. Title: "Contesting Jurisdictions A Comparative Study of State Responses to Honor Killings in Turkey and Isarel. ABSTRACTHonor killings are premeditated murders of women who are believed to have committed a sexual indiscretion. Until recently, Turkish courts routinely reduced sentences for those who killed female family members to "protect" their family honor. In Israel, by contrast, courts rejected honor-related defenses, but perpetrators often received a Presidential pardon and police officers rarely protected women from their families. Although honor killings are by no means specific to minority groups, in Israel and Turkey, they appear to occur disproportionately among the Kurdish and Arab minorities. This project explores why Turkey and Israel have reached such puzzling accommodations with male-dominated social organizations in their minority populations while simultaneously rejecting their demands for "political" autonomy. It asks, too, why this response has begun to change recently. Research for this project will be conducted in two cities with a large minority population in Turkey (Diyarbakir and Sanliurfa) and Israel (Nazareth and Haifa), as well as in the cities of Ankara, Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. The main sources of data are court decisions and in-depth interviews with law enforcement officials, members of minority women's organizations, activist lawyers, and high court judges. In order to identify the extent and nature of accommodation of male-dominated social organizations, court decisions on honor killings will be analyzed comparatively and across time. Interviews with law enforcement officials will reveal the concerns that led them to either accommodate local autonomy or take steps to transform local practices. Interviews with activist lawyers and members of women's groups will reveal whether their position vis-a-vis minority elites, on the one hand, and public officials, on the other, affected the success with which they were able to transform the implicit consensus between law-enforcement officials and minority groups on gender questions. The project promises to improve our understanding of why states in ethnically divided societies sometimes accommodate discriminatory practices within minority groups and why, at other times, they actively intervene to transform such practices. Although scholars have debated the implications of multiculturalism for women's rights extensively from a normative standpoint, few have studied empirically the conditions under which states are likely to intervene in local spheres of authority on minority women's behalf. This project will explore how law is shaped simultaneously by the cultural values of the dominant society and resistance by minority communities. It will contribute to socio-legal thought by identifying whether different patterns of state-minority relations and legal mobilization strategies by minority women result in different levels of accommodation. The project's comparative focus on ethnically divided societies promises to enrich understanding of how legal institutions function in different socio-political contexts.The project's findings will have relevance beyond the academic community by providing sound foundations for policy makers and the human rights community on strategies to address women's rights in ethnically divided societies. It will propose creative legal solutions to resolve the tension between communal autonomy and women's human rights.