Nafisa Shah was first a social activist and journalist, then a scholar, and is now a politician sitting in the National Assembly of Pakistan. All of these aspects of her background emerge in this outstanding book: substantive, pragmatic, based on extensive local knowledge and years of field research, while both scholarly and engaging. The overarching goal of the book is to comprehend the social origins of honor killings—karo-kari—in Upper Sindh as Shah seeks to develop ways to counter them today.

Shah delves into the historical dynamics of the social origins of groups in Upper Sindh and how they adopted practices from one another including how “honour” came to hold central importance in society. Her analyses of Sindh society—and its connections with violence—are compelling, and I know of no other competing work that has such robust descriptions and analyses of Sindh society overall and how social values inform indigenous violence. For example, she terms Kacho, a makeshift, swampy area that is sometimes above, sometimes below ground depending on if the river is flooding or not, as being “in the popular imagination” a vague place, lying outside the domain of the state, law or order … the liminal space from where people engage in conflict” (pp. 26–27). These areas also happen to have the most karo-kari cases. As she locates Upper Sindh as “a historical and postcolonial frontier within the context of power, law and the ideology of honor,” Shah argues that

She posits that “as a violent, cultural form of normative sanction contained within the moral idiom of ghairat, karo-kari persists” (p. 3) within and even through state laws, occupying a central, social, moral, judicial, and ideological position that mediates social relations in Upper Sindh. In other words, to understand the context in which karo-kari—or any form of traditional injustice—occurs, we must also explore the relationships between the state, institutions, and various forms of power. She asks, is karo-kari “a timeless, unchanging social norm—a rasm—or a contemporary cultural product that people expand, adapt, and appropriate in their everyday politics of social relations” and the competition over resources and power? As women's actions within this social context are changing, what are they doing that is increasingly drawing a gunsight onto them? They attempt to break out of suppression and be an adult person, which, many people believe, scares a lot of men.

There is no innate sense of equality in Upper Sindh social life. Instead, Shah shows how most men hold onto the idea that they have the absolute right to determine where a woman goes and what she does, as well as control her mobility and communications to the extreme, even though leaving a house, going to an office, and using a mobile phone are global norms today. It is in reacting against the latter—that their society is changing in ways they never signed on to—that prompts many traditional forms of injustice against women. Shah argues that acts of karo-kari as manifest today are “a contemporary cultural product that often articulates social hierarchies and contests over marriages and resources” (p. 22). She explores women's counter discourses as well, their strategies of resistance and adjustment being central to gender politics in this area.

This book, while relying mostly on the case study of how violence is incorporated and normalized in acts of karo-kari in Sindh, has important parallels for all so-called traditional forms of injustice toward women, many of which are said to be done in the name of justice. The Pakistan National Commission on the Status of Women has identified a number of “customary practices,” in addition to karo-kari, that are harmful to women, including stoning, lashing, vani/swara, watta-sutta, marriage to the Qur'an, and forced and early marriages, among others. Shah, in her role as a politician, grounded in her research on karo-kari in Upper Sindh, helped pass legislation (the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Act 2011) in Pakistan to list all of these acts as specific punishable offenses. Rather than being cynical about this legislation not being able to stop this violence from occurring, one is thankful that at least such acts are now illegal. Importantly, too, people are raising the issue of impunity, and now families cannot just dismiss charges against another family member either for karo-kari or for any of these acts. This is indeed a major advancement for women's rights in Pakistan, and is based in part on Shah's sound scholarship.