This paper is about the modern state, and creativity, resiliency, and community-building after atrocity. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who were displaced from communities in and around the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in the most recent Yezidi / Êzidî genocide attempt, by the Islamic State between 2014 and 2017. During the attempt, members of the Islamic State engaged in killing, abducting, sexually abusing, and enslaving their enemies, especially members of the Êzidî community and faith. Interlocutors spoke to me from their current homes in an IDP camp, in a village near the camp, and in nearby towns. In this paper, I focus on state sovereignty and its various layers and constituencies. Displaced interlocutors told me about living in difficult and cramped physical conditions, with local disputes over camp governance and resources, with fear for their missing family members, and exasperation with the “international community” which had not intervened when the genocide attempt was at its most feverish. I argue in this paper that their predicaments both exemplify and lay bare the claims of the modern state. A modern state is supposed to envelop the inhabitants of its territories with benevolent sovereignty, mainly bureaucracy that orders daily life and legitimized specters of violence that hold non-state violence at bay and allow for a good life. Using Weber’s idea of “the office, not the person,” I suggest that one of the difficulties in these zones is that while one waits for offices to act, persons go ahead and create new social orders. These persons receive, and create, legitimacy for themselves through kinship networks based on patrilineal descent. Thus the action of one member of a patrilineage may be amplified through their network and become more compelling than if done by only one person without a network. The result is a state system that is impressively diverse in the number of bureaucratic and police-like possibilities it offers, but is experienced by my interlocutors as shifting, episodic, and unreliable by displaced people waiting for justice.