This paper explains why states carry out “enforced disappearances” through a comparative study of two repressive periods in Turkey. The frequency of enforced disappearances varies dramatically across time in the country. After the 1980 coup the Turkish state carried out violent repression, arresting, imprisoning, and torturing thousands of regime dissidents and yet disappearing few. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of disappearances was only 33. In the 1990s, the number of disappearances reached over a thousand citizens. What explains this dramatic variation in enforced disappearances in these two turbulent decades of Turkish history that were marked by extensive state violence? We argue that the differences in the characteristics of the political opposition, particularly the subsequent legibility of the opposition for the state, account for the variation in the state’s use of disappearances. States use disappearances when two interrelated conditions exist; they see their opponents as having wide but shallow support (“soft” support) and this makes it difficult to identify who is in the opposition or could join the opposition in the future. In the 1980s the Turkish state could effectively repress its political opposition through more typical forms of state violence, such as arrests and torture. The political opposition that the military attacked in the 1980s was small, composed of autonomous groups based in cities that had little support in the society. It could direct repression against these discrete, limited networks with the knowledge that there was not a large pool of soft supporters in society. In contrast, the state in the 1990s faced a Kurdish movement whose contours of support in the society were unclear, though clearly extensive, and its rural base made discerning its support even more difficult. In other words, the transformation of the Kurdish insurgency, PKK, into a mass movement created problems of legibility for the Turkish state. We argue that the difficulties associated with gathering information and identifying supporters of the PKK, particularly those who act as intermediaries between society and the PKK (the middlemen), led the state to use more subtle means of violence like disappearances. The research for this paper is based on interviews, human rights reports, memoirs of military officers and opposition activists as well as a recent database in Turkey on enforced disappearances.