Violence and Multiple Sovereignties in Kurdish Istanbul Throughout the 1990s, war brought about a sudden passage to urban life for millions of Kurds. Pursuing a policy of counterinsurgency, the Turkish state evacuated around 4,000 villages and displaced more than two million rural Kurds in this period. Istanbul was already host to a sizeable Kurdish population that had come to the city for its economic potential, making it one of the primary destinations for the displaced. Today, there are three million Kurds in Istanbul, around seventeen per cent of the total population. This makes Istanbul “the world’s largest Kurdish city.” Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Kurds move each year between the Kurdish region and Turkish metropoles in search of temporary jobs and daily wage-labor. In this paper, I draw on two years of ethnographic research to explore the multiple and contradictory ways Kurdish working-class men in Istanbul imagine, narrate, and conceptualize violence. How Kurdish workers remember and publicly speak of violence, self-defense, and retribution has notably changed in the context of the resurgence of the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). I came to understand this storytelling of violence, omnipresent in all the social infrastructures of male Kurdish life in Istanbul, as a form of communicative labor through which a distinct historical consciousness and shared understandings of violence are created, networks for survival and dignity engendered, and moral selves crafted. These narratives refuse interpretation of the ongoing Kurdish struggle as mere terrorism or victimhood and instead recuperate Kurdish agency and counterviolence in a field of contested multiple sovereignties. In these narratives, “defense of the community” not only asserts peoples’ right to exist but also charges just violence with moral significance, turning those who protect their community against state violence into aspirational figures.