On April 14, 2009, the “Taliban” murdered a 21-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman in an “extra-judicial honour killing” in Nimroz, Afghanistan, shooting them down in broad daylight after bringing them to a mosque (BBC). While no universally translatable terms for “honour” and “honour-killings” exist in Afghanistan, these and analogous terms are frequently employed by Afghans and non-Afghans alike to categorize such violent events. Such categorizations attribute these acts to primordial oral and written codes of sexual behaviour. My paper asks: what are the formal and informal processes through which “honour” becomes the foremost category of analysis in explaining an array of killings in Afghanistan? Naming events “honour-killings” may obscure and mask multifaceted motivational schemas by ascribing the cause of such actions to a monolithic source. “Honour” becomes both the principal explanatory paradigm in the public and the singular category of analysis for a narrative that is circulated amongst Afghans and non-Afghans alike. This project takes an ethnographic approach to interrogating frames of reference, both formal and informal, to think anew the notion of “honour-killings.” Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul and JalalAbad in 2010 and 2011, my goal in this paper is to unsettle familiar understandings of “honour-killings” by positing what I call the “honour effect,” a discursive framework that transforms complexly motivated killings into singular cultural and affective states. My working hypothesis is that the honour invoked by individual actors cannot be reduced to one causal factor or point of origin, such as Pukhtunwali, Islam, Taliban fat?w?, gender or patriarchy. Instead it is the interplay of various social forces in the formal and informal processes through which honour must be contextualized in order to be rendered intelligible. Killings attributed to honour must therefore address the capillary (bottom-up) level of power inhabiting an interplay of formal and informal processes (Kogacioglu 2004). I seek to illuminate how the everyday practices of violence and the politics of sexuality in Afghanistan configure and are configured by honour-killings as these unpredictable yet familiar acts of violence are systematically folded into social, political, and religious discourses. This paper will contribute to a deeper understanding of the Afghan sexuality that is contextualized in a range of medical, religious, political, and kinship discourses. This paper shifts sexual knowledge about Afghanistan from frozen, compartmentalized, and fixed patterns of coherence into a more dynamic matrix of formal and informal practices in order to render intelligible honour-killings.