The purely electroweak (EW) cross section for the production of two jets in association with a Z boson, in proton–proton collisions at, is measured using data recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7. The electroweak cross section for the final state (with or and j representing the quarks produced in the hard interaction) in the kinematic region defined by,, transverse momentum, and pseudorapidity, is found to be\(\sigma _\mathrm {EW}(\ell\ell\mathrm {jj})= 174\pm 15\,\text {(stat)}\pm 40\,\text {(syst)}\text {\, fb}\), in agreement with the standard model prediction. The associated jet activity of the selected events is studied, in particular in a signal-enriched region of phase space, and the measurements are found to be in agreement with QCD predictions.