Often it is instead a mutual contract of violence, signed in blood by all parties.
The agreement in post-revolutionary France was that the French common citizen would engage in violence on behalf of the state through the service of conscription which was legitimized because the leadership of the state would themselves be subject to violence by the people through public trial. Hence Robespierre's march to the guillotine legitimizing the Republic for a time and having reinforced stability in what would otherwise have been an internal collapse. Rather than the invisible entity of an entity declaring that it would kill you, this was the visible entity of a representative agreeing that you had the authority and legal obligation to kill.
The agreement of harvest kings in water empires being that the king had the right to distribute the resources of heaven because his office is akin to a priest and chief of sacrifices, and the king would lose the mandate of heaven in the event of a poor harvest and so would be sacrificed to the gods. The practice of sacrificing kings to the skies proved unpopular among kings who frequently changed state religions wherever possible, hilariously in the khanate of the Khazars which is one of the few examples of a non-semitic race being converted to Judaism en masse just to avoid the need to propitiate the gods with royal blood. Again, rather than the invisible entity declaring itself your absolute killer, this was a visible individual declaring itself the mediator of both life and death, accepting the power to mete out death in exchange for the death penalty if it could not equally mete out life.
A state is not only composed of its appointees, employees, mercenaries, and elite, nor of its borders and materials. A state is composed of all of its participants, including those held in chattel slavery. Unlawful violence within a state is often a state of violence dividing blocks of a state; this is sometimes dignified by the name of "civil war," even when against what are by and large criminal enterprises such as the opium growers of Afghanistan in their war against the Taliban. The fact that one army is illegal and the other is legal does change the nature of the conflict and does mean that the state is dysfunctional, but a state whose legal use of force is applied recklessly without an illegal army in the field in opposition is also considered a dysfunctional state, little different from one in which
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