The third phase of Central Asia's “transition” – often mischaracterized by Western observers as pointing toward either democracy or communism, with other possibilities ignored – was the creation of new regimes in clan-based societies. Not only Westerners but the Central Asians themselves, as these comments from some Kyrgyz and Uzbek villagers illustrate, had difficulty in understanding what types of regimes were emerging and whether they were democratizing.

In this chapter, I address two central questions of the study: why were some transitional regimes durable, and why did some collapse and then disintegrate into civil violence during the transition? And of the durable regimes, why did one democratize while others established a new authoritarianism? What role can elites play within clan-based societies? Despite the brevity of this period and its failures, understanding the causes and limits of these distinct transitions, and especially Kyrgyzstan's brief foray into democratization, is important for the historical record as well as for what it tells us about the theories and practices regarding democratization that are currently popular in Western academic and policy circles.