The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire witnessed a great wave of anti-Armenian riots that took place in the autumn of 1895 and sporadically continued throughout 1896. These extensive massacres took the lives of thousands of Armenians, while several tens of thousands of Armenians had to convert to Islam in order to escape certain death. The origins, dynamics, extent, and repercussions of this momentous wave of riots inexplicably remain understudied. The lack of original research and misguided yet persistent assumptions still dominate scholarly understandings of these episodes of collective violence. In fact, the existing historiography tends to conceptualize the anti-Armenian riots of 1895-96 as a premeditated official policy in an attempt to annihilate or reduce the Armenian population. In addition, for scholars who argue that the Armenian genocide was the epitome of a policy of extermination already penned out in the late 19th century, the 1895-96 massacres are a mere episode leading up to 1915. In contrast to such narratives that simplify the complex sociopolitical dynamics of intercommunal strife, this paper highlights the preconditions that contributed to the genesis of a violent sociopolitical climate in the eastern provinces. As such, it suggests that a virulent mix of the state’s security policies, local power struggles, Muslim resentment of reforms in favor of Armenians, and revolutionary politics led to the birth of an unprecedented degree of violence. Stripping these violent events of their mythical character, my paper hopes to demonstrate that the responsibilities of state actors in the outbreak of the anti-Armenian riots go beyond the simple question of whether they grew out of a central plan. Unlike the existing narratives that focus merely on the complicity of the Hamidian regime in the mass killing, it underlines the importance of the collective and anonymous nature of the violence. By refraining from the idea that the perpetrators were simply criminal figures who had only been tempted by external forces, i.e. the central and local government, and that their act of mass killing was completely predetermined, this paper explores the agency and background motivations of those who participated in the riots. Consequently, it will argue that the intercommunal tensions and violence between the Armenian and Muslim populations flared out of the convergence of state security practices that increasingly branded the Armenians as a fundamental threat to imperial unity with the socioeconomic concerns and interests of local Muslim notables and Kurdish chieftains.