In the past decade, the Turkish state has expanded its neoliberal developmental strategies throughout Turkey, and particularly in Kurdish provinces, with an emphasis on the extraction of natural resources. Among these projects, the simultaneous construction of hydroelectric dams and expansion of military-posts have ignited intellectual debate and public protests. By exploring how these interventions are refracted through the historically sedimented socio-political life of the physical landscape in Turkish Kurdistan, this paper shows how they in turn provide the cultural and political material for encounters between the state, insurgent politics, people, and capital. Since the 1920s, the production of Anatolia as an ethnically homogeneous space has been central to the Turkish state’s nation-building project. In addition to its demographic policies (including ethnic cleansing), the state drew on a number of geospatial strategies: It destroyed the heritage of non-Turkish groups, confiscated their property, and re-appropriated their historical geographies through infrastructural projects (Oktem 2004). With the emergence of the Kurdish guerilla movement in the 1980s, the previous strategies of the Turkish state took on a counter-insurgency logic (Jongerden 2007): The army destroyed thousands of villages, forests, and fields. By targeting Kurdish landscapes, I argue, the state turned the rural landscapes into a material archive of an undocumented war, and, finally a political tool to act back. This paper focuses on the discursive and material struggles between inhabitants of Dersim, a Kurdish-Kizilbash province in Turkey, and the occupying state over the region’s landscape. I examine how inhabitants locate politics in the physical landscape, working to forensically examine the land in order to imbue it with economic, political, and cultural value. The state in turn responds to this politicization through attempts to contain resistance through building of an extensive network of military posts and hydroelectric dams which reproduce the topography of the region as isolated and contained and submerge material traces of sacred landscapes and past struggles. This paper builds upon an ethnographic study by following the itineraries of activists, and through archival research in state and unofficial archives on the Kurdish conflict. I ultimately ask how we can understand the physical landscape of Dersim as both a medium and mediator of political struggle. The paper brings rural extraction and warfare to the heart of understandings of spatial politics, and the concept of ‘labor of resistance’ to the center of understandings of production in insurgent landscapes, both economically and politically.