This chapter discusses nonstate electoral violence, exploring the circumstances under which nonstate actors resort to violent means to achieve their ends, how state-initiated violence and nonstate violence interact, and also how nonstate electoral violence is produced. It demonstrates a strong and consistent empirical association between violence committed by nonstate actors and corruption, together with a link between this form of violence and vote buying suggestive of carrot-and-stick tactics. The chapter then explores the use made by nonstate actors of violent electoral protest as a mobilizational device, and the techniques whereby politicians enlist vigilante groups and proxies to carry out high-risk forms of violence. Analytically, mobilizational violence can be understood as taking two principal forms: protests against state electoral manipulation and violence between competing informal groupings seeking to secure the loyalty of their clients. Case studies of Pakistan, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, and Côte d'Ivoire help to probe these casual mechanisms and to analyze the production of electoral violence.
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