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.