Kurdish civilians in Western towns and cities of Turkey have increasingly become targets of lynch mobs and riots in the 21st century. The chapter discusses why and how ordinary people are involved and experience violence as perpetrators and victims within the broader theoretical approaches/discussions of ethnic violence including (1)economic deprivation/competition, (2) state capacity/weakness, and (3) authoritarianism/democratization. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis of violence and interview data, the chapter argues that the key process that produced the anti-Kurdish communal violence targeting Kurdish civilians in Western parts of Turkey in the early 2000s was the democratic mobilization and political visibility of the Kurdish civilian population. The chapter also discusses the intersection of economic and political resentment and the indirect role of security fear in relation to armed conflict in the eruption of anti-Kurdish communal violence.