The coercive powers of the state often appear as tools of last resort, to be deployed only when and where efforts at building consent fail. Like Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci rooted his reflections on political life in precisely this distinction:

But while consent and coercion may be analytically demarcated to useful effect, in the concrete apparatuses of the state and the practical world of political life, they are perpetually intertwined. Thus, while indirect rule and its descendants were premised on the search for legitimacy, their existence always assumed the availability and occasional use of coercive force. Chieftaincy could function as a form of substate under the wider regimes of colonial and segregationist rule not only because chiefs were assumed to be the bearers of a culturally given traditional authority (and assumed, therefore, to receive the automatic consent of their subjects), but because they were backed by homeguards, police officers, and military units. Yet, if indirect rule's primary objective was to win the consent of the governed, while also retaining a coercive capacity for use in emergencies, other forms of political apparatus might see the balance between consent and coercion reversed.