Summary: The rigid hierarchy that characterizes state bureaucracies has also been embedded into internaitonal institutions, and it is this architecture that can be vastly improved by restructuring it into a multiscale network. There are both descriptive and prescriptive reasons for doing so: 1) increases in functional efficiency and robustness, and 2) improvements from a normative perspective. As we enter the 21st century, the international system already exhibits many aspects of multiscale networks, but there are typically seen as liabilities and not assets. By providing a richer understanding of multiscale networks, this paper proposes an alternative to Cox's “with them or against them” ultimatum.
