The Organizational Infrastructure of Vigilante Violence: Evidence from India

Vigilante violence threatens order in many societies, but existing theories mostly focus on cases of state weakness. We argue that organizational infrastructure is an important enabling condition for vigilantes, even in relatively capable states and when violence appears to be spontaneous and mass-driven. Using an original dataset of 12,000 Hindu Nationalist schools—the most comprehensive measure of Hindu Nationalist organizational expansion in India to date—we show that vigilante attacks concentrate where nationalist organizations have the strongest, longest-lasting foundations, not in areas of contestation or new expansion. This pattern persists after accounting for state capacity, local demography, and the organization’s expansion strategy. Case evidence from three attacks shows that even apparently spontaneous violence depends on organizational capacity to recruit peripheral participants and stage violence as a public spectacle. Our findings identify organizational infrastructure as a source of variation in where vigilante violence occurs in capable states.