While a great measure of attention has been paid to the transnational plight of the Kurds in recent decades, much of the academic literature has treated the idea of an imagined Kurdish nation as a foregone conclusion and, thus, its ultimate territorial manifestation as a nearly imperative expectation. However, one critical question frequently overlooked is why this massive body of people numbering 25 million, with an abundance of shared cultural capital and stretching across a relatively coherent geographic location, has not managed to realize a territorially-bound sovereign nation. This paper argues that understanding this question necessitates consideration of three paradoxes in the development of nationalism in Turkey. First, the very sociopolitical structures, enabling Kurdish peoples to maintain and develop a distinct cultural capital, from which the raw materials of nationhood could be drawn, were also the primary obstruction to the grassroots dissemination of an imagined community in territories dominated by Kurds. Second, the Late Ottoman and Turkish Republican states’ historical approach to integrating Kurds into their plans to centralize and solidify the Empire/Turkish nation predominantly involved measures aimed at weakening the existing sociopolitical structures in Kurdish dominated areas, thereby, facilitating the growth of a horizontal and “national” understanding of a Kurdish community among Kurds. Finally, Kurdish intellectuals, who have regularly criticized the Turkish state for its actions to integrate/assimilate the Kurds, have often been engaged, at least at the discursive level, in a project with largely the same strategy: to destroy the existing Kurdish sociopolitical structures in order to recreate a “modern” and horizontal understanding of Kurdishness.