Borders not only demarcate domains by monitoring flows and controlling access between them; they also mediate the constitution of social hierarchies and the performance of otherness through the layout and use of very context-specific structures they comprise. This paper examines the emergence of Elaz??, a small Eastern Anatolian town, as an internal border within the national borders of Turkey in the 1930s when Kurdish tribes in the neighboring Dersim province, who had long-standing autonomous structures of governance and ethnic and religious solidarity, rose up against the state’s centralizing and assimilationist policies. Anxious to consolidate its authority, the government of the newly formed and still fragile Turkish nation-state responded with overwhelming force, mounting a devastating air campaign that destroyed a third of the villages in the province. It also cordoned off Dersim, forcibly evacuating survivors to Western Turkey. Thereafter, travel beyond Elaz?? into this combat zone required special military permits akin to an internal passport. Railroads, touted primarily as instruments of market integration and defense against foreign aggression, were used to ferry troops to battle and Dersimis out of their homelands. New surveillance and communication technologies—including reconnaissance flights surveying the land and tracking movements, gendarme stations equipped with searchlights for signaling across long distances—transformed the rugged terrain between Dersim and Elaz?? into a highly militarized landscape. Finally, Elaz??’s state-run cultural and educational establishments, which, despite their formal similarities to their counterparts elsewhere in Turkey, engendered distinctive practices of sorting, detention and public shaming, thereby reinforcing the asymmetries between the Turkish and Kurdish populations through enactment. A critical study of these military, infrastructural, and institutional structures and the functions they sustained establishes Elaz?? as a liminal site revealing the limits of the Turkish state’s central authority, the brittleness of its official ideology and the incoherence of its attempts to suppress Kurdish identities.