World Culture, Uncoupling, Institutional Logics, and Recoupling: Practices and Self-Identification as Institutional Microfoundations of Political Violence

Abstract

This study proposes a micro-institutional theory of political violence, according to which citizens’ participation in political violence is partially an outcome of tight coupling of persons’ practices and self-identifications with institutional logics opposed to dominant logics associated with world culture, such as the nation-state and gender equality. The study focuses on two types of institutional carriers through which persons adopt institutional logics: routine practices and self-identifications associated with three institutional logics: the familial, the ethnic, and the religious logics. Using a 15-country survey data from early twenty-first-century sub-Saharan Africa, the study finds evidence in support of the theory. Reported participation in political violence is associated with practices and self-identifications uncoupled from dominant world-culture logics but tightly coupled with the patriarchal familial logic, with an oppositional ethnic logic, and with a politicized oppositional religious logic.