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Purpose: This chapter examines how two basic rights, freedom of expression, and the right to equality based on one’s dignity, reputation, and honor, were balanced in a case involving a stand-up comedian and an adolescent suffering from Treacher Collins syndrome. Methodology/Approach: The case is contrasted with Jürgen Habermas’ concept of the public sphere and with the intrinsic and utilitarian values that Canadian courts have attributed to free speech. Findings: Because the case was dealt with first in a human rights tribunal and then by a court of appeal, a number of considerations were overlooked in court proceedings: how laughter occurs; the broadening of Ward’s audience and its consequences; and Ward’s publicity strategy. These aspects are explored here to give a more complete picture of the case beyond the court decisions. Originality/Value: In Canada, freedom of expression is usually dealt with ordinary courts. A whole new avenue for dealing with this right is human rights bodies and tribunals. Contesting free speech in the name of defamation is being replaced by rights entrenched in human rights charters, such as the right to equality based on the preservation of one’s dignity, reputation, and honor.

To study the concept of honor in Turkish everyday life discourses. Many surveys have focused on namus, thus referring to honor killings, the mechanism of violence perpetrated against women. The reason given for such killings, often seen as barbaric and the result of criminal urges, is that some men feel compelled to restore what they see as family honor, soiled by the actions of their female relatives. However, these studies avoid another key aspect of honor: namely the plurality of its meanings as honor in Turkey may also be translated both as şeref and onur.

To begin to understand honor in all its forms, I conducted interviews with 100 Turkish men and women ages 20–27, all university students or graduates, from the Istanbul area. I also consulted the current official and Ottoman dictionaries to understand the history of word use.

Among the young adults interviewed “honor-virtue” (i.e., namus) is a debated topic. It may be analyzed at both theoretical and geographic levels and has the connotations of otherness and non-modernity. Namus co-exists with şeref (citizen honor) and onur (dignity).

Redefining the terms of honor could temper tensions between local/global, urban/countryside, modern/traditional, woman/man, and invisible frontier between namus and şeref worldviews. Advocating şeref and focusing on a broader definition of namus may encourage individuals to find their places in society. By focusing on national moral values, any individual in the country may participate in keeping the social order regardless of gender, age, or geographic location.

This study will look at the relationship between norms on gender equality on the one hand and the level of gender equality in the political and socioeconomic sphere, the presence or absence of armed conflict, and general peacefulness on the other.

Data on gender equality norms from the World Values Surveys, political and socioeconomic gender equality from the Global Gender Gap Index, armed conflict from the Uppsala Conflict Data Base, and general peacefulness from the Global Peace Index are analyzed in a bivariate correlation.

The results show a significant association between norms on and attitudes toward gender equality and levels of political and socioeconomic gender equality, absence or presence of armed conflict, and level of general peacefulness.

There is no data base on norms on and attitudes toward the use of violence which is why only levels of violence are included in the study.

The study shows that governments, aid agencies, NGOs and others working on conflict prevention and peace building need to focus on improving gender equality in order to achieve a sustainable decrease in conflict levels and an improvement in general levels of peacefulness.

This study is original in that it looks at norms on gender equality on the individual level on the one hand and actual levels of both gender equality and violence in the society, including armed conflict on the other.

In this chapter, I explore two media texts, Imtiaz Ali's Highway and Alankrita Shrivastava's Netflix original series Bombay Begums (2021). I contend that recent filmmakers have begun to arguably reframe the narratives of rape victim-survivors and disrupting the cultural of silence described above. They offer progressive and multi-faceted representations of these experiences, such that there is an opportunity for a dialogue within both private and public spheres. What I mean when I say that they are ‘progressive representations’ is that the rape victim-survivors are not merely reduced to helpless women in distress, nor painted as vengeful, aggressive characters. Instead, their characterisation shows that they have agency and autonomy, but at the same time struggle with the repercussions of speaking out against their perpetrators in a society that does not support them wholly.

China’s social credit system features a central database, the assignment of social credit scores for individuals and businesses, and the meting out of rewards and punishments, including a form of public shaming. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to develop the system in an effort to promote virtue and trustworthiness. While the idea that a government can ‘legislate morality’ is often scorned, it is not one that we dispute. Our focus is on how the social credit system promotes virtue, how the CCP’s thinking compares with that of certain relevant philosophers, and whether the system is in violation of human rights. As we readily acknowledge, there is a sense in which practically all of us face an informal kind of social credit system; as individuals in society, we expect to be subject to a kind of feedback loop in which good behaviour is rewarded and poor behaviour is punished. Yet China’s social credit system is a remarkably centralised kind of effort, and it enables the CCP to play an extraordinarily dominant role in both controlling and contributing to the feedback loop that people and businesses in China face. In harmony with a chorus of human rights groups, we argue that China’s social credit system is indeed in serious danger of violating certain human rights, particularly certain rights relating to freedom of opinion and expression. Moreover, we contend that this human rights critique of the system is reasonably robust because the kind of human rights involved are liberty rights as opposed to rights to goods and services. As we explain, liberty rights tend not to impose a material burden on others, which helps to give them an especially strong claim for recognition as human rights.

This chapter explores the implications of patrimonial politics in the Dutch East India Company empire in the context of establishing a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa in the mid-seventeenth century. The Cape extended the reach of Company patrimonial networks with elite Company officials circulating throughout the Indian Ocean empire and consolidating their familial ties through marriage both within the colonies and in the United Provinces. These patrimonial networks extended to the Cape as elite Company officials created families locally or married Cape-born women. As the colony grew, the Company created a class of free-burghers some the wealthiest of whom were tied directly into elite Company patrimonial networks. But from the early eighteenth century onwards these elite Company networks came into conflict with the evolving free-burgher patrimonial networks with which they were in direct competition. This paper argues that local patrimonial networks can evolve in a settler colony that challenge the elite patrimonial networks of the imperial elite.

The question of how we know when censorship occurred has several sides. Problems of evidence of censorship do not only arise from practical obstacles, but also from its very nature as a knowledge-related phenomenon. Scarcity and abundance of information about censorship may be determined by the extent of the censors’ success or by uneven research efforts. These factors often make it complicated to demarcate censorship from similar restrictions and to identify patterns and trends in the relationship between power and freedom. The present chapter looks into this epistemological problem by mapping the set of concepts governing and surrounding censorship in the particular field of history. It draws up a mini-dictionary with definitions of 26 key concepts related to, larger than, and different from the censorship of history. As these definitions are interrelated, the set in its entirety forms a taxonomy.

This chapter examines the ways social media, analytics, and disruptive technologies are combined and leveraged by political campaigns to increase the probability of victory through micro-targeting, voter engagement, and public relations. More specifically, the importance of community detection, social influence, natural language processing and text analytics, machine learning, and predictive analytics is assessed and reviewed in relation to political campaigns. In this context, data processing is examined through the lens of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) effective as of May 25, 2018. It is concluded that while data processing during political campaigns does not violate the GDPR, electoral campaigns engage in surveillance, thereby violating Articles 12 and 19, in respect to private life, and freedom of expression accordingly, as stated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.