This chapter provides subnational evidence from Kenya’s Rift Valley and Coast Provinces to show how unstable parties have incentivized elites to organize and sponsor party violence in these places. It also incorporates additional subnational variables, including information on candidates’ anxieties over seats, demographic data, and fine-grained information on grievances to explain where, when, and how violence has been organized in the Rift Valley and Coast.

This chapter introduces the phenomenon of party violence, discusses the scope conditions and central arguments of the book, and offers a methodological justification for the distinct cross-regional comparison of Kenya and India. It also details the multiple data sources used to develop the book’s main claims as well as the subnational research sites investigated in both countries. Substantively, the chapter holds that party instability is an underappreciated factor in the broader instrumentalist literature on elites’ decision-making about conflict. It argues that instability matters because it can make the deployment of violence less costly and risky for politicians and thereby incentivize the production of recurring and severe conflict.

This chapter offers a subnational accounting of patterns of riot violence in Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh and Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. It shows that much like at the national level, these cities fell prey to repeated and severe riots when soaring party instability incentivized conflict on the part of both Congress elites as well as politicians from its emerging electoral rivals. However, following the restoration of relative party stability in the late 1980s, both Hyderabad and Meerut have witnessed communal quiescence. The chapter further shows that this quiescence is due to the fact that elites are keen to avoid sanctioning from voters for engaging in conflict.