This chapter critically reviews the extant scholarship of state formation. It argues that the excessive attention to war and violence produces a confrontational interpretation of state–society relations and neglects the state's role in public goods provision vital to domestic governance. It outlines the main theme of the book, which is to bring state legitimation through public goods provision into the scholarship of state formation. It argues that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation furnished a common normative platform for state and society to collaborate in various issues of domestic governance. This platform allowed state and society to complement each other's weakness in pursuit of good governance. It also provided a limited yet important space for political participation that could be accepted by the state authorities. Although this space was grounded in the conception of "passive rights" rather than "active rights" – that is, rights granted by the state rather than inalienable to the individual – it allowed for a growing degree and scale of political organization and activity and laid the basis for a rethinking of the role of such rights in state formation.

Constitutional law is a problem-solving activity. All problems in constitutional law, without exception, can be analyzed in terms of one or more questions, and all constitutional law questions, without exception, fall into one of two distinct categories: Does the Constitution authorize this governmental action? and does the Constitution prohibit this governmental action? This twofold logic of inquiry into authorization and prohibition guides the constitutional lawyer’s analysis of the problem in a constitutional controversy and provides the intellectual skeleton for constitutional law argument and decision. This chapter will first discuss how the logic of inquiry is used, and then will explain how the two questions are the product of the way the written Constitution is worded and of certain background presuppositions about its purposes.

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.

Because of the economic power of incumbent firms and the political power of multiple veto players, changes to the developmental state were usually incremental.This contributed to the protagonism of the civil service as a change agent. Drawing on three case studies, the chapter illustrates how epistemic communities within the bureaucracy guided a variety of innovations across unconnected policy arenas: fiscal, health, and anti-corruption. Although policy innovation by the bureaucracy was incremental, slow, and often restricted to particular “islands of excellence” within the archipelago of state agencies, it was nonetheless essential to the most important accomplishments of the past generation. Civil service incrementalism, however, may have made change away from the overarching systemic equilibrium of the developmental state less likely, by exacerbating the fiscal quandary, sustaining the coalitional presidential system, and suppressing demands for more radical reform.