This summary chapter focuses on the tensions that characterized the political histories of Southeast Mesoamerica. At the heart of these contradictions are the majority’s strategies to protect their autonomy in the face of those who sought to centralize power and build hierarchy by promoting the rank and file’s dependence on them for essential goods, symbols, and practices. Schemes to concentrate power by reconfiguring extant social nets and the movement of resources through them were met by countermeasures of the intended victims, who redirected needed assets to their projects by working within social networks of their own making. Oscillations between centralizing and decentralizing tendencies occurring at multiple scales resulted from these contests. Shifts in the availability of resources among competitors presented opportunities for the formation of new political arrangements comprised of novel social webs enacted through unprecedented practices. Thus, as diverse agents sought their often contradictory aims, assets derived from multiple origins came to constitute the lives of people of all ranks living across wide swaths of Southeast Mesoamerica.