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Extrapolating a recent conceptualization of caste from India to the global level, this article argues that persons experience cross-national inequalities via their citizenship as a caste marker. Rather than imagine castes as features of the fixed pre-modern Hindu social order, the article posits that castes are variable modern ascriptive social hierarchies subject to contestation and change in which economic and social distinctions are maintained through physical and symbolic violence. The study shows how, globally, nation-states exert physical and symbolic violence to normalize cross-national inequalities instituting a global citizenship-based caste order. This approach recognizes the importance of both global material relations emphasized by world-systems approaches and of symbolic structures central to global institutionalist approaches. The study also underscores persons’ positions and experiences confronting nation-states’ might. Power struggles concentrated on nation-states result in variability of global relations’ mutually reinforcing material and symbolic dimensions. The author uses caste features that appear ‘essential’ (i.e. ascriptive social closure, ‘ethnic,’ ‘religious,’ and ‘purity’ distinctions) as heuristics for identifying possible locations of caste construction and contestation, and identifies citizenship rules, nation-states’ territorial nature, nationalism, and visa, border, and naturalization rituals as such caste development sites. Vulnerable groups (stateless persons, refugees, migrants) both challenge the citizenship caste order and experience viscerally its physical and symbolic violence.

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.