Iraq’s post-2003 political order has experienced unremitting turbulence despite the end of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime. While federalism was seen as a means to safeguard against the reemergence of authoritarianism, the rationale for decentralizing central authority, beginning in 2015, can be viewed primarily as an attempt to salvage state legitimacy by addressing governance issues amid growing popular disenfranchisement and the violent onslaught of so-called Islamic State. But the decentralization process has failed to achieve its desired results, namely, enhancing local service provisions and improving state–society relations. Meanwhile, contestations over the powers and authorities of national and subnational entities have exacerbated political tensions. Ensuring that decentralization contributes positively to state legitimacy rather than undermining it first requires addressing the underlying structural flaws. This includes improving the competence and expertise of local administrative units, enhancing accountability and anti-corruption mechanisms, introducing electoral reforms that can temper political intransigence, and recalibrating international assistance efforts.

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.

The post–Cold War era is when the formation of new states or autonomous regions based on national or ethnic identity gained a new momentum following developments in the ex-USSR and Former Republic of Yugoslavia. The UN Security Council adopted a resolution declaring that states that suppress cultural and political rights of their citizens based on communal identity lose international legitimacy. This, in turn, empowered ethnic groups who were suppressed and whose human rights were violated. It also led to the revival of Wilsonian self-determination, but in a different format, and in this period when the legitimacy of states is questioned as never before through labels such as authoritarian, dictatorial, failed or weak states. Kurdish demands for statehood gained a new momentum in this new era. As a signifier of this trend, the de facto autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq emerged in 1991 and became official in 2005 with the collapse of the Iraqi state and the formation of a federal state. Other Kurdish parties, such as the PKK, shifted their ideological ground and increased their appeal among Kurds. This chapter explains how Kurdish political actors in the Middle East utilised the new international normative framework post-1990 to frame their nationalist self-determination claims within the discourses of justice, human rights and democracy.