This book has explored the social and political meaning of clans, and the logic and dynamics of clan politics over the course of the past century in Central Asia. More broadly, this book has sought to contribute to an understanding and explanation of the rise and fall of clans, and of the impact of clan politics on political regimes and political order. In the preceding pages, I have shed light on an informal level of social organization and politics that is seldom studied, and on a poorly understood but politically important region of the world. The findings of this work suggest that we rethink and broaden our theoretical approaches to studying democratization, regime transition, and institutions, both in Central Asia and in other societies – in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia – where kin, clan, and other informal identity networks are historically strong. This work has further contributed some insight to our understanding of identity and modernity. We need to understand the informal organizations and networks that can powerfully affect regimes, even in the modern era. Clans are not pre-modern phenomena, but socially embedded identity networks that exist in many societies and states, even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What role they play in politics, and whether they survive, is historically contingent. In the Central Asian cases, these networks have changed gradually over time; they have adapted to and continue to adapt to the modern state, Soviet and post-Soviet.