The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between one of the lesser-known, non-Muslim Ottoman communities, the Yezidi Kurds, and the Ottoman Empire in terms of the policy of mandatory military service during the Tanzimat, a period in which the Ottoman state was attempting to exert intensified control over its geographical peripheries. With the Tanzimat (Reorganization) edict of 1839 and the Islahat (Reform) decree of 1856 the Ottoman Empire carried out numerous attempts to centralize its state bureaucracy, surveil its subjects, and create ideal docile bodies, through such means as new courts, land codes, identification cards, extensive censuses, detailed surveys, and, crucially, new military service requirements. In this context, the paper analyzes the implementation of this civilizing mission and its associated centralization policies at the ground level in the peripheries and borderlands of the empire, specifically Mosul and Eastern Anatolia. Furthermore, it examines the reactions of Yezidis to these policies. Yezidis were neither Muslim nor recognized as Peoples of the Book, ahl al-kitab (Jews or Christians), meaning that they did not quite fit into any of the established categories of Ottoman subjecthood. Based on texts from the Ottoman Archives (Bab-i Ali Evrak Odas?), missionary accounts, travelogues, and transcriptions of Yezidi oral tradition, the paper focuses on the various strategies Yezidis employed and how they exercised their agency to negotiate with the empire in order to preserve their community and faith. I argue that the Ottoman Empire’s centralization policies were not only based on what the state envisaged and wrote from the capital, but, especially at the level of local implementation, the definition of control could sometimes change in the peripheries or borderlands as local populations were able to maneuver and negotiate with the state. Investigating the experiences of the Yezidi population and their acts of resistance (Scott 1985) in order to evade military conscription illustrates the flexibility of the empire’s centralization policies and the mobility and agency of the indigenous population to shape their own experiences as Ottoman subjects between 1848 and 1876.