Tribal and kinship identity in Kuwait is central to public and political life. Kinship authority has largely instrumentalised the state bureaucracy. The right tribal last name can be a key to a license, doctor's appointment, building permit, or well-paying job. Government ministry jobs that offer a comfortable salary and short hours are often distributed according to kinship affiliation. For the highest status families, major life events like weddings and funerals can warrant a visit from the Emir. Families and family lineage are often a matter of public knowledge and families pride themselves on the accuracy and completeness of increasingly popular family trees. Social life in Kuwait involves weekly diwaniya meetings where male members of a family gather to drink tea or coffee and talk business and politics. This governing salience of kinship identity in Kuwait, however, was not a foregone conclusion. Rather, patterns of resource access before state building constrained the Kuwaiti ruling family's options in a path-dependent way such that kinship now has governing salience in the country.

Kuwait's competitive access to vital limited resources before state building set the country on this path toward governing kinship salience. Before state building, kinship groups in Kuwait had control over resources in constantly shifting territories known as diyar. To establish territorial control, Kuwait's leadership reached out to these groups in an attempt to bring them under the purview of the state. The outcomes of this process reified the importance of kinship authority in an otherwise bureaucratic Kuwaiti state.

During state building, the Kuwaiti government sedentarised kinship groups onto newly created infrastructure in order to disrupt kinship authority. However, these groups settled together and resisted government attempts to split them up, reasserting kinship authority. The government used the infrastructure it had built to try to extend its bureaucratic authority. This authority, however, was mediated by patronage networks established and governed by kinship authority. As a result, these networks began to instrumentalise the state bureaucracy to obtain resources and political access. Finally, Kuwait developed a nationalist project reflecting a temporal idiom. In other words, the ‘most Kuwaiti’ families are ones who were present in Kuwait earlier. This nationalist project stabilised the ruling family's hold on power and enhanced buy-in to the state-building project. At the same time, it reified kinship authority by glorifying kinship groups with an early presence in the state as important political constituencies.