Chapter six explains the role of Rwanda’s extraordinary state or ‘authority’ – the last of the three themes in the title. It distinguishes between three dimensions of the state’s power: its capability, legitimacy, and autonomy. While the Rwandan state’s unusual high capacity for coercion and coordination vis-à-vis its citizens is well-known, this chapter shows how its legitimacy and autonomy also mattered. Not everyone participated in the violence out of coercion. The chapter traces the origins of these three facets of the state’s power and explains the ways in which each contributed to the extraordinary scale, speed, and scope of the mobilization. The state’s unusual high legitimacy was essential for public acceptance of and participation in policies that targeted civilians. Its low autonomy was necessary for its institutions to be penetrated and its resources to be instrumentalized for private and ultimately violent ends.

Chapter 1 offers a critical overview of how the Israeli regime is classified, addressing two fundamental issues in the debate over its suitable classification: the definition of democracy and the parameters of the unit of analysis. In providing a detailed description of the local dispute among students of Israel, it shows that very few local scholars or studies have provided explicit descriptions of the assumptions and premises on which their arguments are based. Rather than seeking to understand the Israeli regime from a theory-driven, comparative perspective and contextualizing it within the field of regimes and democratization, their primary goal appears to be determining whether Israel is, in fact, a democracy. This chapter also examines how Israel is categorized in cross-national regime indexes, demonstrating that such indexes cannot be exploited to bypass the local dispute. In so doing, it exposes the limits of restricting the focus to the classification of the Israel regime, arguing that this debate can never be conclusively resolved. Finally, it lays the foundation for the alternative approach to describing the Israeli case.