The concluding chapter sums up the existential crisis of the peripheral-patronage state and reasserts its methodological and practical importance, particularly in analyses that presume to derive intention from action and see this as evidence of internalization of, even consent to, norms of human rights and good governance. It then explores the possibility of significant international change, especially from the rise of states whose domestic authority skews more towards patronage than Weberian bureaucracy, and who style themselves as respecters of aid-recipient governments’ sovereignty rather than imposing rights-based conditionalities. China's potentially transformative role receives most attention. Ultimately, because allegedly rising powers may want different rules but are unlikely to advance a rule-free global order, peripheral-patronage states’ need to strategize is unlikely to undergo radical change. This is suggestive of a functionally differentiated hierarchy of states, albeit one whose proper functioning hinges on pretending that hierarchy does not exist.

Waltz claimed that although functional differentiation is inherently a feature of the structure of political systems, the units of anarchic systems are functionally undifferentiated. But states clearly perform differentiation functions than nonstate actors. And, as Waltz emphasized, great powers perform managerial functions in international systems that lesser powers do not. Furthermore, his focus on the similarity of great powers ignores this functional differentiation in the system in favor of attention to particular attributes of one type of parts. Turning to the distribution of capabilities, Waltz’s focus on system polarity (the number of great powers) looks not at how capabilities are actually distributed but only where they are concentrated. This is especially unfortunate because the relativity of power means that the places where capabilities are not concentrated is of great structural importance. And Waltz perversely excludes inequalities of power and relations between the strong and the weak from his account of international political structures.

One of Waltz’s major contributions was the idea that political structures can be specified, in a rough first approximation, by ordering principle, functional differentiation, and distribution of capabilities – an understanding that remains largely taken-for-granted in contemporary IR. This chapter shows, however, that this tripartite conception can neither accurately nor fruitfully depict the structure of three simple anarchic systems: the Hobbesian state of nature, immediate-return forager societies, and great power states systems. In fact, Waltz’s depiction of great power states systems, his implicit model of a generic international system, is wildly inaccurate on all three of his dimensions of structure. Great power states systems, rather than lack hierarchy, are structured by the hierarchical superiority of states and great powers. Great powers, states, and nonstate actors perform different political functions. And the standard Waltzian account of the distribution of capabilities as a matter of the number of great powers (“polarity”) is about as useful as depicting the distribution of wealth in a society by the number of billionaires.

This chapter advocates viewing the structures of international political systems through the lens of multiple dimensions of social differentiation; the structured processes by which social actors and positions are produced, populated, related, reproduced, and transformed. Social differentiation involves, at minimum, establishing who has what authority over whom with respect to which activities; that is, differentiating actors, activities, and authorities (which usually are complexly interrelated). And in addition to institutional and normative dimensions, which are notoriously excluded from the Waltzian account of structure, social differentiation has important material or geo-technical dimensions that are also ignored in the Waltzian account (which is not, as is often claimed, materialist). More generally, I argue that rather than seek to identify a small number of structural models composed of a few elements, we should aim for a checklist of dimensions of differentiation that illuminate some recurrently important features of the structures of some social and political systems of interest.