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It is increasingly recognized that association patterns of most gregarious animals are nonrandom. However, nonrandom patterns can emerge in any population that exhibits spatial structure, even if individuals associate randomly. In species that lack clearly differentiated social relationships characteristic of socially complex mammals, space use patterns must be considered alongside association patterns in order to establish whether nonrandom association patterns are determined by underlying social structure or are merely an artifact of spatial structure. In this study, we simultaneously consider space use and association patterns for a wild population of reticulated giraffe. We examined whether the giraffe’s flexible fission–fusion association patterns were embedded in higher levels of social organization. We identified multilevel social organization in which individuals were members of social cliques. Cliques …