Recently, scholars have taken an interest in so-called State-Mobilized Movements (SMMs) in autocracies, which help autocracies deal with internal and external threats. This paper addresses variations in how SMMs operate, asking under what conditions autocracies opt for more centralized versus more decentralized modes of citizen mobilization. Particularly, it focuses on one form of increasingly common decentralized SMMs: government-organized NGOs (GONGOs). This paper leverages a longitudinal, within-case study of Jordanian authoritarian youth mobilization centering on a variation on the dependent variable: the fact that an elevated youth threat in one era of youth threat to the regime – the era of challenges to regime legitimacy during King Hussein's reign (1952-1999) – led to a centralized mobilization around new state institutions, such as the Ministry of Youth and by inculcating youth in state scripts. In contrast, a similar elevated youth threat around the Arab Uprisings yielded a fundamentally decentralized mobilization, characterized by GONGOs, movement-like self-governance, and a mix of state and non-state languages and scripts. Building on a mix of archival data and ethnography in Jordanian youth GONGOs, I advance an explanatory framework around the level of regime-state alignment. In the earlier period, working with an overall model of state expansion, the regime showed little restraint in leveraging state power to mobilize youth. In contrast, in the later period, the regime faced ambiguities vis á vis state institutions. Not only did the regime have qualms about the effectiveness of state institutions mobilizing youth, given that those institutions were producing the very tragic outcomes – unemployment, precarity, loss of welfare – that were generating the youth grievances and attendant youth threat that gave rise to the need to mobilize youth in the first place. Swelling the ranks of state-run organizations was also at odds with the regime’s overarching tactic of weaning youth off of state dependence in the context of neoliberalization. This resulted in a compromise: a more nebulous and decentralized form of youth mobilization in the form of GONGOs and a mix of state and non-state scripts. The level of regime-state alignment helps explain the seemingly contradictory ways autocracies mobilize citizens, like empowerment, civic activism, and liberal ideals (see, e.g., Jones 2017). Moreover, the regime-state misalignment also helps explain the emergence of GONGOs: the need for mobilization and the hesitancy in unleashing the state to do so is generative of the oxymoronic ambiguities that the GONGO acronym constitutes.