In addition to being one of the most recent entrants to the global club of liberal democracies, Tunisia also bears the distinction of being the largest exporter per capita of foreign combatants to transnational jihad in the Eastern Mediterranean. Today, following the recent collapse of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the issue of return for Tunisian ex-combatants and their family members has become a highly politicized affair. Despite pressure from human rights groups within Tunisia and abroad, the state has used security imperatives as a means of resisting responsibility for Tunisian citizens stranded in former Islamic State territories. The security situation in post-revolutionary Tunisia therefore presents a limit case of what is meant by liberal democracy. Can democratic institutions reconcile the most abjected subjects to its moral claims? Or must certain subjects, like the jihadi and returning ex-combatant, be included only as exceptions, who cannot be reconciled within the ambit of law, civil liberties and rights? In this paper, I reflect on the turn to kinship as the grounds of an affective politics of human rights, in an era when citizenship regimes are being eroded by security imperatives under the global War on Terror. My observations are based on participant-observation with the Rescue Association for Tunisians Trapped Abroad (RATTA), a Tunisian NGO that advocates for families whose kin-members have migrated to the Islamic State. Unlike strategies of “immediation” where the body is used to express a universal humanity for the suffering subject (Allen 2009), these families foreground spectacles of normatively gendered bonds, like that between mother and son, to show how the loss of kin leaves them exposed to immeasurable pain. Women’s—and particularly mothers’—performances are viewed by RATTA as especially efficacious, since they conform to normatively gendered scripts that appeal to the patriarchal state as masculine savior (Taylor 1997). I hone-in specifically on the place of motherhood in a kin-based strategy to defend human rights for perpetrators of non-state violence, and to secure the Tunisian homecoming of jihadists’ wives and their stateless children. These struggles highlight mounting frictions in Tunisia between state sovereignty (heibat addawla) and kinship’s “immoderate” nature, suffused with an excess of love and ever-adapting to changing relational forms (Lambek 2013). In exposing its arbitrary violence, kinship and motherhood bring about a crisis of legitimacy at the very heart of state sovereignty.