The concluding chapter briefly summarizes the main findings and discusses the broader implications for the study of international relations. This book has argued that the trade-off between good information and political security helps to explain why leaders often charge headfirst into conflict that they lose. Whereas much of the existing literature posits that bureaucratic participation in a foreign policy decision-making process tends to degrade the information available to leaders as they choose between war and peace, this book has instead argued that institutions and leaders benefit from the information that the bureaucracy provides, especially when leaders pit bureaucracies against one another in competitive dialogue. Yet leaders often forgo these institutions precisely to avoid the costs that a powerful bureaucracy can impose on their prospects for political survival. As such, miscalculation on the road to war is often the byproduct of how leaders resolve the trade-off between a more accurate vision of the world and protection from bureaucratic punishment.

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.

Political Scientists and sociologists have specialized on two different sectors of political representation: political parties and interest groupls for the first; social movements for the second. This division has left open a lacuna in the relations between movements and parties that recent scholars in both fields have worked to fill. The task has become more pressing in the current period, when parties have “hollowed out” and civil society has produced a “movement society.” This chapter charts these recent efforts and attempts to merge them in a new approach to American political development

In Chapter 8, we discuss the downstream impliactions of our argument and its scholarly, practical, and normative contributions. We first return to the themes of transparency and power, and assess our empirical findings and the related research. We analyze how the presence of a confidentiality function in an international organization (IO) may influence power dynamics and institutional transparency, and derive implications for understanding how IOs can manage such tensions. We also synthesize lessons from existing research on path dependence as well as findings from our four empirical chapters to reflect on the likely origins and decline of confidentiality systems. The chapter then discusses the broad relevance of our theory for other empirical domains and briefly reviews extensions to peacekeeping, international finance, cybersecurity, and environmental issues, which suggest the wide applicability of our framework. We conclude by analyzing the implications of our claims for scholarship on international politics.