In the wake of the Arab Spring, the hamlet of Tahsin in the Nile Delta Governorate of Egypt claimed “Administrative Independence” from the state in 2012. Tahsin’s movement, which commenced approximately a decade prior to this wider upsurge, was a unique experience of a rural community’s attempts at sovereignty making. The claim to “independence” was in response to the violence experienced through state neglect: the lack of basic services, the decay and ruination of existing structures, and the resultant everyday repercussions of direct violence. The village youth materialized their movement into building the absent infrastructural services, in the absence of the state's provision of them. I investigate how memory (Nora 1996[1992]; Halbwachs 1980[1950]), generations (Mannheim 1982[1928]; Scott 2013) and ruins (Stoler 2013; Gordillo 2014) coalesce in producing incentives for political action and sovereignty making. I build on recent scholarship on ruins and ruination to understand how violence is manifested through infrastructural failures. Marginalized rural communities—outside of the urban centers of control in pushing for state accountability and recognition—magnify material-affective relations as infrastructure becomes their chosen channel to claim rights and implicate state institutions and officials in their sovereignty demands. My paper will therefore reveal the ways in which violence can be generative, becoming the bases on which new structures can be built and used for sovereignty making and recognition.