This presentation will be based on my dissertation project titled “Crafting the Self in the Shadow of the Turkish State: The Formation of Yurtsever Subjecthood in the 1990s,” which analyzes the building of the Kurdish youth movement in the 1990s. The revolutionary Kurdish youth movement in the 1990s called themselves yurtsever. Yurtsever literally means patriot, but it has a larger connotation that blends identification as a supporter of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) with a revolutionary sense of the self. Yurtsever identity crystallized in the 1990s, when a new form of colonial relation was constituted in Turkey’s Kurdish areas. While Kurdish subjects appeared as a threat to be eliminated for national security and the continuity of state power, the PKK called on them for political resistance to reclaim control over their lives. A new form of subjectivity emerged in the 1990s, and Kurdish youth, alongside Kurdish women, have been one of the main carriers of this subjectivity. Yurtsever subjectivity was a reclaim of dignity, a sense of belonging, and a mobilization for recognition in the ethnicised and militarized space of the Turkish state. For my project, I conducted field work in Diyarbakir between January 2015 and January 2016, which combined in depth and semi-structured interviews, archival research, as well as auto-ethnography. I examined the formation of revolutionary subjects in Ziya Gökalp High School, a preeminent state school that turned out to be one of the main centers of yurtsever youth mobilization during the 1990s. This presentation specifically deals with three important findings of my field research: 1) In the youth mobilization of the 1990s there was no a priori political subjects who participated in a political activity as a result of their rational decisions. Yurtsever subject was formed as a process of political transformation in a historically specific moment. 2) For the yurtsever youth, to be a revolutionary was a craft work and they were organized with the idea of self-making for the revolution. 3) Friendship played a crucial role in the formation of the yurtsever subject as being a ground of self-making and as a tie for solidarity against the physical and symbolic violence of the Turkish state. My work approaches the formation of revolutionary subjects in the Kurdish youth movement as a process of the political, the creation of a new space for those who have been previously excluded Ranciere (2001), and proposes friendship as a political concept.