Although violent rituals share causal processes with adjacent forms of collective violence, their organization gives special prominence to certain mechanisms and processes. To an exceptional degree, those mechanisms activate relevant boundaries, stories, and relations to the exclusion of most others as they incorporate all the relevant actors and social sites into a single connected set of performances. Activation produces high salience of violent means, while incorporation produces high coordination of violent actors and actions. In the cases at hand, we will see the following mechanisms and processes recurrently at work.
*Boundary activation/deactivation* – a shift in social interactions such that they increasingly (a) organize around a single us–them boundary and (b) differentiate between within-boundary and cross-boundary interactions. (Boundary deactivation denotes the opposite shift, toward new or multiple boundaries and toward diminished difference between within-boundary and cross-boundary interactions.)
Polarization – widening of political and social space between claimants in a contentious episode and gravitation of previously uncommitted or moderate actors toward one, the other, or both extremes.
Competitive display – simultaneous or consecutive signaling of capacity by two or more actors within the same arena.
Monitoring – exercise of continuous surveillance over actions within a social site.
Containment – placement of a relatively impermeable perimeter around an actor, set of actors, place, or other social site.
*Certification/decertification* – validation of actors, their performances, and their claims by external authorities; decertification is the withdrawal of such validation by certifying agents.