Kurds, mostly living within present-day Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, are the largest stateless nation in the world. Despite the fact that there has been a long history of Kurdish nationalism, an officially recognized Kurdish state has never existed. This paper focuses on the construction of Kurdish cultural and national identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within the context of Kurdish national discourse. While doing so, the paper analyzes the constant dialogue that took place among: 1- Various strategies that the Ottoman state and its bureaucrats adopted to gradually transform the Kurds from “the state of savagery and nomadism” into the fold of civilization, through institutions like the Commission of Tribes and Immigrants, Hamidian Light Cavalry and tribal/local schools especially during and after the reign of Abdulhamid II, 2-Rhetorical, institutional and political strategies that Kurdish leaders adopted to exteriorize the Ottoman state and the discourses that the state had applied to its nomadic/tribal periphery and 3- Socio-political structure in Ottoman Kurdistan. The last dimension of this trilogy does not only help us to understand how nomadic, semi-nomadic and sedentary tribal organizations, family structures, and religious systems of Ottoman Kurdistan affected the Ottoman state’s policies to deal with its ‘disordered Kurdish provinces’ but it also gives us insights about the constructive and constitutive role of Ottoman Kurdistan in the formation of Kurdish national and cultural discourses in the late Ottoman period.