The category of ‘inter-communal violence’ has been increasingly mobilised to interpret subnational violence in contemporary Africa. The paper contends this is an unwelcome trend that risks leaving violence unmoored from political and military systems it is enmeshed within. The paper advances an alternative framework for approaching such violence, using the cases of South Sudan and Nigeria to illustrate this framework. In purposefully weakened or deinstitutionalised systems, the paper argues, regimes tolerate, incite, or exploit forms of subnational violence to enhance their power or marginalise rivals, with such violence being closely (albeit unevenly and sometimes unsustainably) entwined with elite agendas.

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