Combatting so-called honour-related violence has gained salience as a policy priority cross-nationally. Across Sweden, Canada, and the United Kingdom it is often being framed as integral to achieving gender equality. At the same time, the issue is often communicated in ways which denigrate racial and religious minorities. Across these contexts, civil society organisations (CSOs) have played a significant role in calling attention to the gendered impacts of honour violence, but there has been little systematic empirical consideration of how CSOs’ communication strategies and policy proposals vary, and the extent to which they are able to challenge femonationalist narratives. Drawing on document text analysis and semi-structured interviews across three country cases, we trace how CSO’s frame and communicate demands, the broader strategies that are deployed to influence policy debates, and if and how these discourses are ultimately translated into specific policies. Our findings show that CSOs employ different communicative frames, and enjoy different levels of impact on policy processes, depending on whether they are constituted as feminist, intersectional or racial justice organizations. This has important implications relating to the instrumentalisation of gendered violence in political communication, adaptability of equality architectures to engage with CSO demands, and the critical role that political communication plays in policy formation and implementation processes.
