Kurdish and Assyrian communities in the mountainous region located between Van and Mosul lived together in relative peace for most of the period between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, beginning in the 1830s, social and political tensions between these communities grew considerably, eventually escalating into widespread violence in the 1840s. The most violent episodes occurred against Assyrian communities in the villages of Tiyari, Diz, and Ashitha in 1843 and in the village of Tkhuma in 1846 in which some five to ten thousand women, men, and children were killed. There are two prevailing scholarly camps that have emerged around the questions of who was behind such violence and why it occurred. According to one camp, the Ottoman state worked in tandem with semi-autonomous local Kurdish groups to perpetrate violent attacks against the Assyrians as a means of centralizing control over its periphery. According to the other camp, Assyrian communities agitated for increasing political autonomy and provoked local Kurdish groups to undertake violence against them, which the Ottoman state was unable to prevent due to its weak political control over the region and the region’s geographic inaccessibility. Both scholarly camps craft their narratives by relying primarily on Western sources. Furthermore these camps have generally been preoccupied with the question of culpability in violence and have not rooted their arguments in a strong theoretical framework that explains in great depth why actors justified either non-violence or violence as a means of achieving different sociopolitical objectives. The aim of this study is to reassess Kurdish-Assyrian relations between 1831 and 1864 through the lens of a different theoretical framework that focuses on the logic of peace and violence among different actors. It interrogates a diverse array of sources, including the Ottoman, Russian, and British archives as well as reports and memoirs from Western missionaries and state officials, in order to determine how different actors viewed the role of violence and peace in relationships with other communities. It also makes extensive use of the Ottoman archives in order to provide a vivid backdrop of competing political forces in the Mosul, Diyarbakir, and Van eyalets (provinces) during the time, which previous studies have not done. Lastly this study looks at how state and local actors interacted to either resolve or table conflicts in the region. This will hopefully provide a valuable contribution to the study of Muslim-Christian relations in the late Ottoman Empire.